Get better outcomes by starting with a rapid assessment

How can buyers improve value for money outcomes in services procurement?

The key is asking the right questions. 

When you pay for a service it's important to maximise the value you receive. However, ensuring value for money requires a clear understanding of your needs and the ability to clearly articulate them.

Maximising service value is especially important for government buyers, who must meet the value for money test.

Unfortunately, it's common for buyers to approach the market with vague requests that only partially address their challenges, or, even worse, seek solutions they don't genuinely need. Why? Because they don’t know what the actual problem is.

In certain respects, purchasing a service before understanding your core issue is akin to buying Panadol for backache relief. Panadol may provide temporary respite, but once it wears off, the pain comes back because you're addressing the symptom, not the root cause.

To put it in the context of an organisation, imagine you have a project that is going poorly. Your symptoms are delays, cost overruns and a group of unhappy stakeholders. There could be multiple reasons why the project is going badly but the first instinct is to just treat the problems.

So, you throw more resources at it, re-baseline the schedule and for a while you might think that the project is back on track.

However, what tends to happen over time is that all of the original problems, or symptoms, re-emerge. And it happens because you didn’t take the time to understand the root causes and put in place measures to fix them.

Many organisations reach this point and decide to bring in external . You They recognise that they’re facing a compounding problem that they can't fix alone. But they still don't know the underlying cause is and therefore what is needed. There are a few reasons why this happens. Internal teams may lack the expertise to diagnose the problem, or may be too close to the situation to see it clearly.

The efficacy of a service provider is directly proportionate to how well you can define and describe your problem or need. If your requirements are unclear, providers might account for that uncertainty in their pricing or, worse, provide solutions that won’t meet your real needs. Either way, you won't receive value for money.

To avoid these issues, consider getting a consultant to perform a rapid assessment. This doesn’t have to take much time or cost a lot, but with a small investment, you can set yourself up for better value and outcomes in the long run.

What is a rapid assessment?

A rapid assessment is an unbiased, targeted and highly tailorable diagnostic evaluation that helps companies confirm key risks / gaps, key opportunities and key initiatives (a Roadmap) that lead to successful benefit realization. A cost-effective, high-value entry point exists for clients in a range of scenarios such as:

•  Wanting to improve business performance.
• Understand they have a problem but aren’t quite sure what it is or where it lies.
• Have a project / program in mind but aren’t quite sure what steps are involved and what resources and budget need to be allocated.

Three phases of a rapid assessment

The assessment is typically conducted over three phases, Discover, Analyse and Report, and could be done in as little as 3 weeks or over a few months depending on the level of detail and complexity of the issue/organisation.

Discover

In the Discover phase we review documentation and engage with stakeholders to understand the organisation, context and what has been happening. We always approach these types of engagement with a completely open mind, not pre-supposing the why.

Analyse

We then move on to analyse the information, benchmarking against similar organisations and best practice, using the experience of the team along with the insights available to us from across the RSM network. We focus on really drilling down on the issues to understand the causes, not just the effects.

Report

Finally, we prepare a report detailing our findings and, more importantly, recommendations and a roadmap for implementing them. The format will differ depending on what we have been asked to look at, but it will generally include commentary around alignment to the organisations strategy, identification of risks, opportunities for improvement with a time horizon and an estimate of resource requirements to implement.

Importantly throughout we engage with the client keeping them informed of progress and providing early insights. We want to make sure that the final deliverables are implementable in the client’s context.

Achieving value for money in your procurement activities

Having gone through the rapid assessment process the client is able to start implementing solutions themselves, or with external support, confident that they will be maximising the value of their investment because they have asked the right questions.

For more information

To learn more about rapid assessment for your organisation, contact the Director of RSM’s Government and Public Sector Consulting team, Chris Perry .