Why give school users a reduced task list?
One of the main user needs for this work is to give school users an understanding of what is, has and will happen within their procurement so there would be a temptation to give school users the same list as procurement operations leads. However, procurement operations have a number of tasks thorough out the process that include things like:
- internal approval and oversight
- ensuring work is completed in a compliant manner
- additional tasks to record procurement information, create documentation and do work on 3rd party sights.
Feedback from procurement operations was that:
- this extra information could confuse school users
- it could create a sense of complacency as school users may see procurement operations tasks before theirs
- they did not want to share all their tasks with school users
What is the smallest task list?
For school users, stage 1 approach to market, is mostly about working collaboratively and being informed about recorded decisions. With this in mind we have included the following tasks below.
Discuss requirement and route to market
Going forwards we think that we should not share the progress of the procurement operation leads actions, rather it should instead be a page of guidance. Current thinking is that this task is about preparing school users for the initial calls with procurement operations leads. Detailing what the purpose of the call is, who will be needed and what the outcomes are.
Record route to market and contract value
This is a task for procurement operations leads to record information about the route to market for auditing purposes and for school users to have a record of the route to market. Procurement operations can set this information, conditionally disclosing additional questions when appropriate, however school users are instead presented the answers.
Set procurement timeline
Once the preceding tasks have been completed, procurement operations will now be in a position to move from estimated dates to firm dates that will be worked towards. This can only happen once the route to market has been defined as this will have an affect on timelines.
Current thinking is that this will again be an informative screen for schools to explain its purpose and that at this point the dates are firmed up.
Later tasks
Stage 2, prepare and go to market, involves a lot more collaboration with schools as documents will need to be passed back and forth and then final documents saved to an appropriate location. This means that long term, we may want to look at how documents are shared back and forth to avoid the issues associated with the current email system. Initial thinking is that we could use a messaging component with simple file sharing to facilitate the back and forth with an explicit upload task to indicate which document is the final version.