For this week’s Guest Post Friday here at Musings, we welcome back Harold (Hal) Good, CPPO. Hal served as Director of Procurement and Contracting for the city of Palm Springs, California and Palm Springs International Airport for twenty-one years. He has also held procurement and contracting related Positions at New York University Medical Center and Frederick County Government. He was a regional director for an early federal, state and local E-commerce and E-procurement services provider. He currently does consulting work and hosts a multi-discipline group on Linkedin; Procurement Pros. You can also find him on Twitter @Hal_Good and @ProcurementPros.
One of the hottest subjects in procurement circles is the need for procurement professionals to become less focused on process and cost and to think more strategically including collaboratively defining “value” with the input of stakeholders. Creating solicitation processes with award based on criteria, in addition to cost, requires development and utilization of sourcing and contracting processes more complex than traditional bids especially for highly regulated public construction projects. In many public agencies, the mandate to award to the “lowest responsible bidder” who submits a responsive bid remains in the mandated regulations. Public agency construction project development has been particularly restrictive in this respect, placing emphasis on cost, relying on the assumption that the same project will be built no matter which contractor performs the work.
