Procurement

The parts you cannot hand to a supplier

Whoever else is involved, some of this work stays with you. Here is what usually does.

• How long it takes. Procurement runs on its own clock, often many months from first idea to signed contract. One team's experience puts the buying alone at 12 to 24 months. Treat that as an illustration and get the figure for your own case from your procurement office. Plan your timelines around it early, so it does not catch you short.
• The requirements, in writing. Above $40,000 of professional services, the contracting authority needs a written statement of work before award, and the business owner signs a confirmation that the requirements are complete. The dollar value changes the paperwork; the duty to get the requirements right applies whatever the value.
• The decisions only you can make. What problem you are solving, what good outcomes look like, whether to reuse or buy, and how to break the work into pieces. No one can make these calls for you.
• What you bring to each approval. Every checkpoint along the way expects something from you, a document, a number, a sign-off, and the work waits until it has it.
• Answering for it. You can hand a supplier the work. You cannot hand over the answering. When the service stumbles, it is your department that explains why, and the question comes back to you.
• What you sign today is still binding in ten years. The contract shapes the whole later life of the service: what it costs, whether you can change it, and whether you can ever move off it. None of that is easy to revisit once it is signed.

You do not need to be an expert. You need to stay in charge, and to ask when you are unsure.

Choosing what to buy

What each route is, and how it runs

The route decides when the department signs, and the signature is the moment that matters. Up to it, nothing is committed and the department can still ask for what it needs. After it, everything is a negotiation with one supplier.

The steps of a procurement

You might not run all of it yourself, but you should recognise every step.

Describing what you buy

What good looks like

A handful of things, all of which you can check. Each one has its own page.

Why it matters

Whose job it is

Your department's. You can give the building to a supplier, but the responsibility stays with you, and if the service lets somebody down, "the contractor did it" is not an answer anyone will accept. The Treasury Board Directive on the Management of Procurement puts the same thing in policy terms.

Four parties, and the split between them holds for the whole buy:

TBS's GCcase migration guidance sets out the same split.

Procurement glossary

Procurement has its own vocabulary, and most of it is never explained to the person whose service is being bought. These are the words a business owner runs into, in the order they tend to turn up.

None of these describe a special agile process. They are the ordinary machinery of federal buying, and knowing the names is most of what it takes to follow a conversation about your own service.

What Procurement looks like in each phase

Procurement runs through the whole life of a service, but it weighs more at some stages than others.

Two things about PSPC's guide are worth knowing before you open it. It is written for PSPC procurement officers rather than for departments, and it says of itself that it is informational and not prescriptive: officers may use other approaches. So it describes shapes that have worked, not a method you have to follow.

What PSPC means by agile procurement

Its definition rests on four things, and none of them is about software:

How it runs in practice

The clearest picture of it is the example PSPC works through, which is an example rather than a prescribed method. It runs like this:

1. One solicitation goes out. It carries the challenge statement, the outcomes, the criteria the prototypes will be judged against, and the terms for building the real thing afterwards. All of that has to be there up front, because criteria applied after award have to be in the solicitation.
2. Suppliers bid on paper. Written proposals, not prototypes. In the example, nine bids came in.
3. Several prototype contracts are awarded at once, to the top-ranked bidders. Each one buys a prototype and holds an option for building the real thing later, so nobody is yet under contract to deliver the service itself. In the example, four of the nine bidders were awarded one.
4. Each supplier builds a prototype under its contract, and the prototypes are assessed against the criteria that were in the solicitation. This is where the real choosing happens, and it happens after signature.
5. The winner's contract is amended to exercise an option to build the production solution. There is no second competition and no second contract. In the example the first choice later failed to meet the requirements, and Canada moved to the next-best prototype, because those contracts were still alive.

That is one shape among several the guide describes. Others break the work into phases with go and no-go gates between them, or release it task by task under contracts with task authorizations, or run a series of overlapping competitions, one per part of the problem, each opened once the previous part had found its direction.

Prototypes can also come before anyone is under contract

In that example nobody builds anything until contracts are signed. The guide allows two earlier points as well:

• At pre-qualification. A supplier can be asked to demonstrate a potential solution, or part of one, to help work out which approaches conceptually meet the need before the solicitation goes out.
• At solicitation. Suppliers can be asked for demonstrations, proofs of concept, prototypes or samples alongside their written proposals, so the choice rests on something tangible.

How it differs from the traditional way

The two shapes differ in almost every part of the process, not only in when the contract is signed. Below that, the same programme bought each way, with what each buys you and what it costs.

What it costs you

• It is not a faster way to buy. PSPC says so itself: the extra engagement takes time, and an iterative strategy may lengthen the whole procurement. Plan the schedule on the basis that it will be no quicker.
• It is resource-intensive. It needs dedicated people from both the department and procurement, and a governance structure decided for this purchase. That is a senior-management decision, not something a project team can adopt quietly.
• The flexibility has to be written in advance. Change requests, off-ramps, the clause that lets Canada move to the next-ranked supplier, and the criteria for choosing later all have to be in the solicitation. None of it can be added once the contract is signed, which is the whole reason the shape matters.

If it is that much work, why go through it?

• You choose based on something built, not on a written promise. Prototypes and demonstrations show you what a supplier can actually do, which a proposal document cannot.
• A wrong turn costs one piece instead of the programme. Smaller contracts running alongside each other mean a supplier who cannot deliver is replaced rather than salvaged, and there is no catastrophic restart at the end of two years.
• The price firms up as the design does. Costs are refined while the work is under way rather than guessed at proposal stage, which is when nobody yet knows enough to guess well.
• Problems surface while they are still cheap. That is the trade for the extra time: the delays agile procurement avoids are the failure-driven ones, which are the expensive kind.

You do not have to take all of it. PSPC says most procurements can adopt some agile elements, and engaging the market early, or keeping the statement of work high-level, are worth doing on their own.

The whole shape suits a purchase where the solution is genuinely unknown, where the options are changing quickly, or where what people need is likely to move while the work is under way. Where the thing being bought is well understood, the ordinary route is the right one.

The official instruments behind procurement

• Accessibility conformance report (ACR)Only ifsourceAssessment

  A supplier's written statement of how far their product meets the accessibility standard, clause by clause, with the gaps named. It is a claim to be tested.

  • AlphaGather
  • BetaSign or accept
  • MaturityKeep current
• Official languages in what you buyOnly ifStanding duty

  The obligation to write official languages requirements into the contract, so the supplier is contractually bound to deliver both languages.

  • AlphaGather
  • BetaSign or accept
  • MaturityKeep current
• Security Requirements Check List (SRCL, form TBS/SCT 350-103)Only ifsourceSubmission

  A short form that states, for one contract, exactly what security the supplier and its people need: what level of information they will touch, what screening each role needs, and whether the company may hold government information at its own offices.

  • DiscoveryCheck
  • AlphaFill
  • BetaSign or acceptSubmit
  • GrowthKeep current
  • MaturityKeep current
  • SunsetKeep current
• Supplier organization and personnel security screeningOnly ifsourceAuthorization

  The clearances a company and its individual staff must hold before touching sensitive government work. A department cannot issue them itself, and the work cannot be awarded until the clearance is confirmed in writing.

  • AlphaCheck
  • BetaGatherSign or accept
  • GrowthKeep current
  • MaturityKeep current
• Contracts awarded to Indigenous businesses (the 5% target)Only ifsourceStanding duty

  A government-wide commitment that at least 5% of the total value of contracts goes to Indigenous businesses each year. Departments plan for it, report against it, and meet it or miss it one procurement at a time.

  • DiscoveryCheck
  • AlphaGather