Overview

  Properly develop strategy - Underdeveloped commercial strategies will not be achievable

When we are given a 'commercial strategy' as part of our audit, we rarely see commercial options fully considered and there is often a lack of realism of what can be achieved. To avoid setting itself up to fail, government needs to use commercial strategies to outline why and how it is going to conduct commercial relationships and what it wants to get from these relationships. This will prevent it from relying on generic procurement approaches with little tailoring to the specifics of the contract. Although we have found examples of where teams have adequately considered trade-offs between priorities, we often find that 'strategies' do not tackle some of the core issues that need to be considered.