Tag Archives: Professionals

Municipal Procurement is More Than Just RFPs

Over the past few months we were out at a number of municipal conferences and events and it always surprises me to hear the number of folks who think municipalities are only able to procure goods or services via the RFP (Request for Proposal) process. They express their dislike for the process and they report the process discourages many small and medium enterprises from attempting to find work in municipalities.

No doubt, in the municipal sector procurement is a dynamic, sometimes complex process. However, what many are not aware of is that there is a variety of procurement methods available to municipalities to procure the goods and services they need.

The procurement of consulting and professional services still must be a competitive process but whether you’re a large company or a small or medium consultant or professional enterprise, it is still possible to acquire work in municipalities without ever needing to respond to a RFP.

In Ontario, Canada, municipalities must comply with the procurement requirements set out in the Municipal Act, 2001, S.O. 2001, Chapter 25, Section 270(1) 3. The legislation requires municipalities to develop policies to be adopted on the types of procurement processes that will be used, the goals of each, the circumstances under which each type will be used, and the circumstances where a tendering process is not required. 

Here are some of the procurement methods municipalities can employ to procure goods and services.

  1. Request for Proposal (RFP) – used to solicit solutions for the delivery of complex goods, services or construction for obtaining unique proposals designed to meet broad outcomes to a complex problem or need for which there is no clear or single solution.
  2. Request for Tender (RFT) – used to acquire goods and services based on stated terms and conditions and for obtaining competitive bids based on precisely defined requirements for which a clear or single solution exists.
  3. Request for Quotation (RFQ) – is where the municipality specifies the product or service and the criteria is based solely on price. The goals are the same as for Request for Tender, except that bid solicitation is done primarily on an invitational basis from a pre-determined bidders list – but may be supplemented with public advertising of the procurement opportunity.
  4. Request for Expression of Interest (RFEI) – is a procurement used to determine the interest of the market place to provide goods or service(s) which the agency is contemplating purchasing.
  5. Request for Information (RFI) – is a request used as a general market research tool to determine what goods and services are available that may meet business/operational requirements and acquisition strategies. 
  6. Request for Pre-Qualification (RFPQ) – is a procurement document used to solicit financial stability, technical information, product or service suitability from potential vendors and measured against stated evaluation criteria. Successful vendor(s) are pre-qualified or short listed to bid on specific categories of work or provide specific types of goods or services, or respond to a particular RFP or RFT
  7. Informal, Low Value Procurement – used to obtain competitive pricing for a one-time procurement in an expeditious and cost-effective manner through phone, fax, e-mail, other similar communication method, vendor advertisements or vendor catalogues.
  8. Non-Competitive Procurement/Invitational Competitive Procurement – in some circumstances, competitive procurements are not required. Municipalities can invite three or more qualified suppliers to submit written proposals to supply goods or services as specified by them. The goal is to allow for procurement in an efficient and timely manner without seeking competitive pricing.

Non-competitive procurement includes sole sourcing and single sourcing.

Sole sourcing is the procurement of goods or a service that is unique to a particular vendor and cannot be obtained from another source. Single sourcing is the procurement of goods or a service from a particular vendor rather than through solicitation of bids from other vendors who can also provide the same item.

Single sourcing may be the best course to take in some circumstances but it is important for the municipality to be transparent about what those circumstances will be.

Typically, non-competitive procurement is used in the following circumstances:

  • when there is a statutory- or market-based monopoly on the item
  • when no bids were received in a competitive process
  • when the required item is covered by an exclusive right such as a patent, copyright or exclusive license
  • when the purchase is already covered by a lease-purchase agreement where payments are partially or totally credited to the purchase
  • when it is necessary to ensure compatibility with existing products or to avoid violating warranty/guarantee requirements when service is required
  • when the required item is in short supply due to market conditions
  • when competitive sourcing for low value procurement would be uneconomical or would not attract bids
  • when competitive procurement may be found to be impractical for such items as meal expenses, incidental travel expenses (e.g. taxi service, phone calls), and training and education expenses
  • when an urgent procurement is necessary for fulfilling a statutory order issued by a federal or provincial authority, such as an environmental, public health, or workplace safety compliance order.

To procure consulting and professional services in particular for larger more complicated projects, municipalities will still tend to use the RFP method. But for the smaller projects municipalities can, and do employ other procurement methods, such as the informal low value and non-competitive methods when possible.

Often they have no choice but to use these two methods to procure professional services because they simply cannot find enough consulting and professional enterprises to acquire the number of quotes they need to satisfy the requirements in their procurement by-laws and policies.

So, if you’re a consultant and/or a professional who would like to find work in municipalities – don’t give up. There are opportunities for you that do not involve wasting endless hours filling out an RFP only to find that on the 99th page of the 100 page document, there is one requirement you can’t meet.

Helping municipalities and professionals connect is the best way I know of to enhance the municipal procurement process and connect the municipalities and professionals that are trying to find each other.

Simple right?

Note: “In-Procurement”, a procurement magazine in the United Kingdom, published Susan’s article in 2016.

Susan Shannon is the Owner/Principal of www.muniSERV.ca.  Her experiences as both a municipal Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) and as a municipal needs specialist prompted her to create muniSERV. Her passion continues to be to find ways to “Help Municipalities & Professionals Connect”. She can be reached at [email protected].

Share

Update on our Partnerships in Procurement – Bridging the Buyer/Vendor Gap Presentation

As some of our members know our partners, bids&tenders invited muniSERV.ca to speak at their users’ group meeting for public sector buyers on October 13th, 2016 – and we invited Keith Strachan, of SellToPublicSector.com to co-present with us.  We asked our members for some common bidder issues they’ve experienced when responding to RFPs – and we got some great ones from you – Thanks!  This is the update we promised to provide to you after the session.

The attendees included buyers from the municipal, healthcare and school sectors. The municipal buyers were from small, medium and large regional municipalities which provided a good cross-section of procurement perspectives.

We shared some of the common bidder issues we heard from you and then asked for feedback from the buyers in attendance. Here’s our presentation slides.

The attendees were very engaged and offered great feedback and solutions to the issues we raised on your behalf.  Here are just a couple of them:

Finding Public Sector Opportunities – A small consultant whose services are usually less than $20,000 may not find many opportunities on public tendering websites.  How do they spread the word and/or where do they post opportunities that fall below their RFP thresholds?

Buyers’ Response:  School boards and Hospitals have mandatory posting requirements for all projects and they all must be through a mandated competitive process.

Municipalities reported they have a difficult time addressing this because there is really no one place to post them. Some hold Vendor Days where they will invite vendors to come in and they will provide them with a list of all upcoming smaller projects.  Still others only circulate them to a list of their preferred vendors in order to save time.

Take Aways: 

muniSERV: We will be actively encouraging municipalities to post, not only their RFP documents, but now also any invitations to bid on these smaller projects, which typically are consulting and professional services.  

Consultants:  Check municipal websites for any upcoming Vendor Days and participate in them.  Also investigate how to become a preferred vendor in the municipalities in which you’re interested in finding work.

Complying with Requirements – Do you really need $5m insurance coverage?

We gave the example of a muniSERV professional who wanted to respond to an RFP for graphic design work but the RFP requested they have $5m insurance coverage, WSIB and a lot of requirements that didn’t seem to fit the small project.  They ended up not responding because they simply could not meet the requirements.

Buyers’ Response: Municipalities need to ensure they have all the bases covered so their legal and risk management teams will include the full standard requirements in the RFP document.  However, if the requirements appear unreasonable for the specific project, vendors just need to call the municipality and bring it to their attention.  The purchasers then will ask their legal and risk management teams to review the requirements and most often they will agree and reduce or eliminate the requirement all together if it’s not imperative or mandatory for the specific project.  If this happens they will then issue an addendum to the RFP to notify vendors of the reduced requirements.  

Take Aways:

muniSERV:  It is interesting to note vendors can make this kind of request and/or that buyers would alter their original requirements, if deemed appropriate. 

Consultants:  If some requirements seem unreasonable for a project you want to respond to don’t be afraid to ask the municipality to reconsider them. You may not need $5m insurance after all! 

Thanks again to all those who took the time to help us!  The presentation would not have gone as well as it did without your input!
 

Thanks too, to bids&tenders for the opportunity to present your bidder issues directly to the public sector buyers so we could learn from each other and continue to Bridge the Buyer/Vendor Gap!

 

Susan Shannon, Principal muniSERV.ca

Share

CivicInfo BC – Conference on Asset Management

Asset Management BC – Conference on Asset Management

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

 Asset Management for Sustainable Service Delivery: A BC Framework

 Shaping your organization for Asset Management

 Communicating the message

 Long term financial planning

 Performance measures

 How to define service levels

 UBCM Survey: Lessons learned

 November 3 – 4, 2016

More information & To Register

Share

The Mental Health Commission of Canada – The Working Mind Train-the-Trainer Certification

The Working Mind: Promoting mental health and building resilience for Canadian workers.  Workplace mental health is fast becoming one of the highest priority concerns among Canadian employers.

The Working Mind (TWM) is an evidence based program designed to reduce stigma and address and promote mental health and resiliency in the workplace.

This certification by the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) trains you to deliver both the full and half-day formats to staff within your organization.

See More and Register  

Share

You Can’t Build a Team or Organization Different from You

We can’t build a team or organization that’s different from us. Successful team or organization leadership begins with successful self-leadership. The first step in improving my team or organization is improving me.

 “The management of self is critical. Without it, leaders may do more harm than good. Like incompetent physicians, incompetent managers make people sicker and less vital.“

— Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders (in a chapter entitled “Leading Others, Managing Yourself”)

Too many managers who aspire to lead and develop others haven’t learned how to lead and develop themselves. They are trying to build organizations or provide services that are different than they are. These well-intentioned managers are trying to improve their teams or organizations without improving themselves. Many seem to be living along the lines of Mark Twain’s observation, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”

Here are some examples of these all too common disconnects between organization and personal performance:

  • Pessimistic managers push their companies to be market and industry leaders while blaming external factors like the economy for their poor performance.
  • Managers with stunted personal growth set strategies to build a “Learning Organization.”
  • Managers produce team and organization vision, values, and mission statements without having clarified and aligned their own personal preferred future,      principles, and purpose.
  • A major program to improve customer service is initiated by managers who boss, direct, and control rather than serve their organization’s servers.
  • Managers with weak levels of continuous personal improvement implement change and improvement programs — for others.
  • Strict Techno managers (bureaucratic or technical experts) oversee rigid systems and processes while trying to encourage risk taking and innovation.
  • Management groups comprised of turf protecting departmental managers, fighting like three kids in the back seat on a long hot drive, try to get others to build stronger teams.
  • Disorganized managers with poor time management habits are setting goals, priorities, and disciplined processes for everyone else.
  • Although they have no personal improvement plan, process, or habits, managers develop extensive organization transformation and improvement plans.
  • While avoiding (and shooting messengers of) personal feedback, managers construct extensive performance appraisal systems and talk about the importance of accountability — for everyone else.

 

A Team or Organization Can’t Rise Above the Level of Its Leadership

“Organizational change begins with leaders who walk the talk by transforming themselves.“

— Stratford Sherman, “Leaders Learn to Heed the Voice Within”, Fortune

It just doesn’t work. We can’t build a team or organization that’s different from us. We can’t make them into something we’re not. But I’ve watched countless managers and management teams try. There are two major reasons that this disconnected approach doesn’t work. First, unless you’re a superb actor, you can’t be a split personality and teach or lead others to do something that’s out of basic alignment with your own habits, skills, and characteristics.

Second, everyone’s “phoniness radar” or “BS meters” are getting ever more sensitive (from overuse). We’re getting fed up with sanctimonious church leaders charged with sexual abuse, fat doctors telling us to get into shape, politicians giving retractable promises to get elected, executives drawing big salaries and bonuses while their company’s financial value declines, municipal transit managers who don’t take their own buses to work, training and consulting companies who don’t practice what they teach, and the like.

I once wrote a scathing note (which was never answered) and quit a speakers’ association because I kept hearing “the old pros” telling people who wanted to get on speaking platforms and tell others how to be successful to “fake ’til you make it.” (The personal and organization improvement field has its share of aspiring speakers and consultants who don’t practice what they preach). One of those speakers also asked me to provide a jacket quote endorsement for a “motivational book” he bragged he’d written “on a six hour airplane flight.” And that’s about how much research and thought the warmed-over platitudes, old jokes, and generalities he’d pieced together obviously had. I declined his invitation.

We loathe phoniness and crave genuineness in our leaders. If I aspire to be a leader, the authenticity (being the real thing) that stems from aligning who I am with where I am trying to take my team or organization will inspire trust, cooperation, and forgiveness in the people who’ll help take me there. Nobody expects us to be the perfect role model. But they do expect to see a close connection between who we are and the direction we’re pointing the team or organization toward.

Or they at least need to see that we recognize our shortcomings and we are working hard to improve ourselves so we can close the organization-personal performance gap. Otherwise they’ll shrug off all our team and organization improvement rhetoric and planning with a sense that this is just Kidney Stone Management — it will hurt for awhile, but this too shall pass. “Watch out, he/she has been off to another seminar (or read another book). If we lay low long enough, he/she will move on to the next fad”.

Successful team or organization leadership begins with successful self-leadership. The first step in improving my team or organization is improving me.

Reprinted with the permission of Jim Clemmer. For over three decades Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats, and seven best-selling books translated into many languages, articles, blog, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The CLEMMER Group is Zenger Folkman’s Canadian Strategic Partner, an award-winning firm best known for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system for developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations.

http://www.clemmergroup.com

 

Share

7 Common Bidder Issues

At a session I attended a couple of years ago the City of Mississauga’s procurement department identified these common bidder issues.

  • How to find bid opportunities
  • Who to Contact
  • Onerous Requirement & Lengthy Bid Documents
  • Not enough information
  • Not enough time permitted to respond
  • Bid Rejections – doing all the work only to have it rejected
  • Perception of Secrecy

Sound familiar? I imagine you can all relate to these concerns and they are often the very reasons why many consultants and professionals shy away from, or simply no longer respond to, price-based RFPs for professional services. Detailed pricing just takes a lot of time and responding to a RFP can cost respondents a lot of money in lost time alone.

This is the first in a series of informational articles/blogs on these common bidder issues.  I will be tackling each of these issues separately and will be offering suggestions on how you can address them throughout the series.

The first one:

How to Find Bid Opportunities

Municipalities have limited advertising budgets so the days of posting their bid opportunities in the local paper have all but disappeared, except perhaps where required under a trade agreement or their own procurement by-law. The reason is that hard copy advertising is probably the most costly way for municipalities to advertise bid opportunities – plus it’s not a very effective way either because the ads don’t necessarily reach their target audience – which is the professionals they want to respond.

Most municipalities now have a Bids/Tenders section on their own municipal websites and they will post any bid opportunities they have in that location of their own website. This works well if you’re a local consultant who only wants to work in a geographic area near your business but it would be far too time-consuming to check 444 individual municipal websites daily for new bid opportunities.

To get broader exposure for their bid opportunities, and ultimately to acquire more competitive quotes, many municipalities now post their RFPs on outside websites – like muniSERV.ca, specifically designed for RFPs for consulting/professionals services, or bids&tenders, etc. for construction and other RFPs.  This enhances openness and transparency in the procurement process, helps municipalities target their advertising directly to the professionals/vendors they’re trying to reach and increases the number and quality of quotes they receive.  Bidders pay a fee to use such sites but they do help professionals/vendors find and access hundreds of bid opportunities daily – plus they offer automated email notifications that will notify members when a RFP has been posted that matches the service they provide.

How a municipality advertises their bid opportunities varies but it should be set out in their procurement or purchasing by-law, or in a policy that forms part of their procurement by-law. Most municipalities will have their procurement/purchasing by-law posted in the by-law section of their websites, so if you want to check how a specific municipality in which you’re looking for work advertises their bid opportunities, you can get a copy of their procurement by-law from their website.

Larger projects with certain value thresholds which are subject to certain trade agreements will have specific advertising and notice requirements. Under such agreements procurement opportunities must be advertised for a minimum number of days, irrespective of the advertising method used. Again, the project value thresholds, the number of days and how they will be advertised can be found in the municipality’s purchasing/procurement by-law.

In the municipal sector procurement is a dynamic, sometimes complex process. It is governed by contract law as well as various statutes.

But as you can see there are a variety of ways to find bid opportunities. It all comes down to your preferred method and the time and money you want to spend on finding them.

Susan Shannon is Principal of muniSERV.ca.  Earlier in her career she was a municipal Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) and as a result she understands first-hand the challenges faced by both municipalities and professionals/vendors in public sector procurement.  Connect and follow her on LinkedIn, join the muniSERV LinkedIn Group or reach her at 855 477 5095 or [email protected].

 

Share