A successful procurement process depends on the quality of the Client's brief, which should set out comprehensive information as to the Client's business needs and all relevant external factors, including:
■ The initial goals and objectives of the project, signed off by the Client as the definition of the business need to be met
■ All project specific requirements and constraints that may be pertinent
■ Any time and budgetary constraints.
The Construction Industry Research and Information Association ('CIRIA'), in its 1998 guidance 'Selecting Contractors by Value', recognised the need for Clients and their advisers to invest time and money in procurement strategies and processes in order:
■ Thoroughly to work through and prioritise what they are seeking to gain from a project
■ To set up projects so as to enable contractors to contribute the maximum value
■ To identify relevant criteria for their selection
■ To gather information to enable these criteria to be applied.
In order to run a procurement process on the basis of quality as well as price, a Client needs to establish a range of criteria that can be assessed objectively. A process of market consultation through informal early market engagement will often reveal important information that influences the Client's approach in framing its criteria for the identification and appointment of the Principal Designer, the Principal Contractor and other team members.
The Construction Playbook requires the use of 'value-based procurement' by which it expects that Clients will 'consider the outcomes they are trying to achieve and identify wider value drivers beyond speed, cost and quality'. This work in being taken forward by the Construction Innovation Hub in the development and trialling of their 'Value Toolkit' which is expected to be complementary to and symbiotic with this guidance.
The Construction Playbook requires that the evaluation of bids is based on a Client's 'clear understanding of value, their desired/required outcomes and how these align to government's wider priorities, including net zero GHG emissions by 2050'. It recognises that framework providers and clients will need to adopt new evaluation practices in order to achieve this clear understanding and requires that:
■ 'Value-based procurement should be adopted at an organisational level and driven through a portfolio approach to projects and programmes'
■ 'Evaluation - and evaluation criteria- should focus on value over cost'
■ 'The quality evaluation criteria need to be sufficiently well developed and detailed to allow for the differentiation in scores between competing bids, to avoid too close or identical scores from bidders'.
ISO 44001 suggests that the evaluation criteria for the members of a collaborative team can include assessment of each organisation's commitment to collaborative working, including for example:
■ 'Collaborative profile and experience
■ Cultural compatibility
■ Customer relationship management
■ Supplier relationship management
■ Stakeholder implications.'
The Client's own criteria for the success of a project should guide its creation of evaluation criteria for proposed team members These evaluation criteria need to be detailed and measurable rather than general commitments to collaborate. Criteria should be weighted so that they reflect the Client's needs and the anticipated project outcomes and deliverables.
Clients should use their evaluation criteria to obtain clear commitments from bidders rather than vague collaborative promises that can be evaded or reinterpreted at a later stage. The claim that a team member wants to work collaboratively but that other team members have let it down is often used to justify a reversion to narrow self-interest when challenges arise.
The 1995 Cabinet Office report 'Construction Procurement by Government - an Efficiency Unit Scrutiny' found that 'the best projects [we saw] and the best private sector clients put time into getting the right team. They assessed the quality of the individuals, their ability to work together and their experience.' The Cabinet Office was concerned that public sector Clients frequently put together teams with undue emphasis on lowest price or expediency. They recommended, for example, that interviewing the individuals who will actually work on the project should be normal practice, providing 'the opportunity to compare the applicant's creative approaches to the design process, as well as their interpretation and understanding of the project implementation' plus 'an important insight into each applicant's management style and communications'.
A University of Reading report in 2018 described how evaluation criteria for team members on the 'Dudley College' Trial Project included behaviours such as:
■ Ability to work in a spirit of mutual trust
■ Ability to work with a 'no-blame mindset'
■ Ability to understand/appreciate perspective of others and adapt behaviour appropriately
■ Mutual respect between differing disciplines and personalities.
The Reading report explained how 'following post-tender interviews, a behavioural workshop was held with bidding parties to validate the assessments made by the Client Advisory Team from previous assessment activities. Behavioural analysis or other forms of psychometric profiling of individuals and teams can be revealing but is a demanding process and, in the absence of contractual constraints, it cannot prevent those individuals leaving an organisation after its appointment'.