Strategic Objectives in Procurement

I had meant to start this post off differently, but sadly our family hamster passed away this evening.?Her name was Ginger and she died peacefully in her sleep.?We buried her in our garden, beside the birdbath.?We all wrote her notes about what she meant to us.?Ginny never bit anyone, she gave us something to nurture when the world was topsy-turvy, she taught my children a lesson about the precious gift of life.?She was our pandemic pet and she was … well… she was perfect.

I highlighted in my article last week about the importance of identifying objectives at the onset of a procurement.?They define what a procurement is intended to achieve for the procuring authority.?They often include desired accomplishments or risks to be avoided.?Requirements, by comparison define the performance attributes of what you are buying. ?

Listening to my children read aloud their epitaphs about a hamster that met every objective you could imagine, I was reminded of what I believe is the most effective technique for eliciting objectives from a group of stakeholders. ?

Ask the team to imagine itself in the future, at the end of the project and look back.?What would they want to say about what the project had achieved? ?It seems simple, but it works.

There is some intermingling to be certain between objectives and requirements - clearly an objective of all procurements is to have sufficient confidence that the requirements will be met.?But it will also include other factors such as schedule certainty, a smooth transition from existing services, the achievement of socio-economic benefits, and cost certainty.? Perhaps most importantly is an objective statement around value for money - is the intention to get the most “value” from a set budget, achieve a set “value” for the lowest price, or a more nuanced variable tradespace between “value” and money.

While requirements can be set by individual user groups, this is not the case with strategic objectives.?These must be set by senior stakeholders, working together.?The available bandwidth and attention of these stakeholders is often in short supply, so I recommend that this task be delegated to the level of the Project Manager and their contemporaries in stakeholder organizations.?A proposed list of objectives should then be submitted to senior governance for review and approval.?Posting this list in a public place (or being so bold as to share it with Industry) sets the backdrop against which procurement design decisions can be made and improves the likelihood that you will achieve them.?Don’t be good, be great.

?RIP Ginny (April 2020 - July 2022)