17.2.4 Agenda
• As far as practicable an agenda should be agreed in advance, with the unsuccessful bidder asked to identify ahead of the session any particular issues they wish to discuss, to allow for adequate preparation.
• In the debrief session, the Procuring Agency should cover the key aspects of the commercial, legal, design, services and technical elements of the bids. The bidders should have the opportunity to provide feedback on key aspects of the process and tender documents. Refer table 16-1.
Table 16-1 Example Agenda
| 1 | Overview of the process and evaluation with commentary at a high level on strengths and weaknesses. | |
| 2 | Project team members | Feedback on specific elements/evaluation criteria including (but not limited to): - Design - Technical/Services - Commercial and legal |
| 3 | Bidder/consortium members | Feedback on the tender process and relevant aspects of the tender that could include documentation, timing, scope and departures, risk and the commercial framework. |
| 4 | Other business | Opportunity for other relevant issues to be raised |
• The debrief session is to cover strengths and weaknesses, to enable learnings to be incorporated into future projects. The Procuring Agency should provide feedback that is an assessment against the evaluation criteria, and as far as possible all comments should be objective and consistent with the evaluation panel's position. It is appropriate to provide some comparative feedback to give a sense of performance relative to other bidders. However comparisons should not include details of other bids or relative evaluation scores.
• While it is recognised that the financial criteria are of key interest to the unsuccessful bidders, value for money is made up of numerous components. The Procuring Agency should not volunteer to disclose details of price. However, there may be occasions where the Procuring Agency can indicate, in generalised terms, the unsuccessful bidder's relative cost competitiveness - for example, the unsuccessful bidder's risk adjusted cost was "comparable to" or "significantly higher than" the winning bidder's offer, before considering relative design, technical and service merits, as part of the overall value for money solution.
• After the Procuring Agency provides its feedback, the session should take the form of a questions and answers forum - that is, it must be a two-way interaction with opportunities for an unsuccessful bidder to seek clarification on any aspect of the process or its bid. The Procuring Agency may choose not to respond to every question, and should indicate in this case why it considers answering a question is inappropriate.
• The debrief session with the winning bidder is likely to take place amongst many other workshops and meetings. However, the debrief should follow an agenda, and aim to build the future working relationship. It is an opportunity to provide an early indication of the key areas the Procuring Agency intends to monitor during design and construction and operations.