Green Space Management - Best practice tendering - part one

By Sid Sullivan Friday, 17 February 2012

In the first of three articles on tendering, Sid Sullivan tackles the key questions during the planning phase.

Tendering and contracts are undergoing a period of change - image: HW

Landscape maintenance and contracts, and tendering, are undergoing a sea change. It is no longer sufficient to write an old-style contract in which all work is specified to the last action and reaction and price is the only consideration.

The cost of maintaining and managing your landscapes is a vital component of the tendering process. It is, however, possible to retain quality and achieve best value from your budgets through a collaborative partnership with your provider, rather than the provider and your own staff managing the fine print and technical requirements.

There are three distinct but interlinked phases to procuring best-value landscape maintenance contracts:

1. Planning. What is it that has been achieved to date? What went well and what requires improvement?

2. Writing a tender, specification and procurement strategy to attract a provider to deliver what you need.

3. Collaboration and joint ownership of the outcomes from stages one and two linked to the inevitable changes to budget and users' requirements.

It is the first phase, planning, that is addressed in this article.

Planning phase

The first and perhaps most valuable work that you have to complete is collecting data about what worked and what did not during the last contract period. It is also necessary at this time to collect information about who should be involved as a consultee in the re-tendering process. This involves three lists:

- A list of all the good feedback and the achievements of the current contracting arrangements.

- A list of the all the issues that have arisen, broken down into sections. Those that arise because the service did not meet the standard specified and those that involved the user requesting a service that went beyond what was specified.

- Your engagement strategy and list of consultees, and how and at what stage you will involve them.

To ensure that deadlines are met, I produce a Gantt chart listing activities and crucial dates to keep the process on track. There are many free Gantt chart downloads on the web, although I prefer to use Microsoft Project Manager.

Taking the lists one at a time, the first should be reduced to a summary of what is required from the new landscape contract and tracked against your green space and other strategic plans. Parks users will notice any reduction in service immediately and then they will complain. Your reputation is at stake here, so getting this right is a good start to the process.

The issues list is another source of potential problems, but they now have solutions. Are these issues matters that your new contract will seek to resolve? If so, they should be added to list one. If not, they should be discarded, but they must form part of your consultation programme. They should also be the stimulus for providing a users' charter. This should describe exactly what services your landscape provider will deliver, timing and quality. Finally, you need a list of consultees, and to decide at which stages of the re-tendering process you will involve them.

An overarching consideration is to what extent you will involve volunteers and other pro bono contributions, and how their involvement will be described in the tender and the specification. The same approach applies to the "new" forms of management, such as parks trusts, that your council may be developing. You should also write a note to yourself to ask your potential provider to describe how they will work with your volunteers and trusts, and involve them in the delivery of service excellence. It is important to determine whether they will help you recruit and train volunteers, and how they will integrate volunteers' work with that of their own staff.

While you are collecting together your lists and data, it is essential to make a decision about how you will make use of the internet and your website to engage potential maintenance providers, volunteers and the user. Why is it that in an age when most of us would be lost without our BlackBerry, iPod and web access, so few parks services make full use of the internet?

The web provides you with an ideal environment to inform and track the development and delivery of landscape services and to obtain feedback from users. It offers you the most versatile and transparent means of communicating with the vast majority of your users and potential providers as well as your volunteer audience. It will also enable you to engage with your users, extend the opportunity to promote the service and, crucially, provide a means for continuing advocacy in favour of your service. The potential of the web includes:

- Service standards and maintenance frequencies, park by park, can be published for users to consult.

- Instant feedback can be collected - picture uploads from mobile phones showing good or not so good service delivery.

- Complaints can be easily and quickly recorded and resolved - and, importantly, seen to be dealt with.

- The contribution of volunteers can be publicly recorded and praised.

- A continuous log of issues can be collected for the annual review of the provider's performance.

There are, of course, many more sophisticated uses that can be developed. So can you afford not to have a web presence? In the wider context of the sector, if more parks services were to use the internet as I describe, far more data would exist from which to judge the performance of parks services and their landscape providers, and that could be used to promote the case for better parks funding. It would also move parks management and maintenance into a 21st century medium and mindset, something that is long overdue.

Having completed the planning phase and collected and summarised your data, you can begin the next stage of preparing your service to deliver the fabled "more for less". If you have proceeded as suggested above, you will be clear about what has worked well in the past, what you require for the future and how to achieve your engagement aspirations through a web-based strategy. It is then time to proceed to stage two, which the next article in this series will cover.

Sid Sullivan is a parks consultant.