Gill Walker’s Post

I was happily surprised to see this investigation about abuse of the tendering process in Innovation Aus today. I would love to know how the tendering process is supposed to work - because I am confident that it is rarely working in this way. One of the many challenges in finding suppliers - in most Technology consulting, and especially in the CRM space, where I focus - is getting to a point where the requirements can be accurately described. When this is not done well, one side loses, and often badly. As many organisations do not have the skills to put together a project brief, it is natural to reach out to a connection for assistance. If this connection then tenders for the project, they undoubtedly have an advantage. And, it requires a huge amount of time and effort to put together a response to a tender - so an organisation is unlikely to make that investment unless they have a real prospect of winning the work. There are also disadvantages to the tenderer in using an unknown supplier. I feel strongly that identifying the best team to do a job is achieved by a gradual back-and-forth process where each side gets to know the other and the detail of the work is thrashed out at the same time. As the tender process makes this impossible it is hardly surprising that people find ways around it. Recently, I have been involved in a tender that was in two phases - phase one was purely design of a CRM solution, and phase two was the implementation of that design. Any organisation who tendered for phase one was excluded from phase two. This sounds good in theory, but I struggle to see how the implementation can be successful if no-one involved in the design is still around. All in all, tenders are tough - for everyone involved in them.

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