On public procurement in mission-based working
How to harness the power of procurement to help tackle the most pressing challenges we face was the topic of a roundtable on 8 March that we were delighted to attend, hosted by Camden Council and UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
Read on for reflections on that topic from the LAIN core team.
On 8 March, we were delighted to attend a roundtable on mission-led procurement hosted by Georgia Gould, Leader of Camden Council and Mariana Mazzucatto of UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, looking at how we can design, build and test new approaches to address the social and economic challenges we face.
The roundtable called for honest commentary and critique of day-to-day challenges in procurement - from skillsets within teams to systems capabilities - which provide opportunities for innovation and improvement.
Like Camden, the London Anchor Institutions’ Network (LAIN) is also following a mission-based approach. Made up of public sector, educational, cultural, faith-based and industry organisations across the capital who spend billions of pounds a year collectively on goods and services, this is a hugely relevant topic for us.
Over the last year and a half, members of the LAIN procurement working group have been defining and delivering interventions to ensure that a healthy chunk of our procurement budgets reaches smaller, diverse London-based businesses, contributing to local economic resilience and bringing business benefits to anchor institutions themselves through more motivated and engaged supply chains.
This work began with a ‘deep dive’ into the barriers that smaller businesses face when trying to do business with us, from knowing where to find opportunities, through to prohibitively high insurance requirements, jargonistic legal language or challenges around understanding social value and how to demonstrate it. It has also included a shift away from simply posting contract opportunities on e-portals, to proactively marketing them to reach new, more diverse suppliers.
As the team supporting the network, we’ve had a unique vantage point, witnessing our members’ shared challenges and learnings in tackling these barriers, a few of which we summarise below.
Procurement needs to be understood as a whole system
It sounds basic, but innovating within procurement requires oversight of the entire process; thinking of it as a system with component parts (legal documents, portals, market engagement events) and accountabilities.
In other words: if we aren’t already, we need to start thinking of procurement in terms of the whole ‘user journey’ and how we can use skillsets across our organisations to improve it.
Different skills and capabilities are required
From our experience, skillsets that could help accelerate our shared goal to buy more from smaller London-based businesses include skills in areas like service and user experience design, project accountancy or copywriting (making briefs, tenders and web pages simpler and more accessible).
Systemic capabilities are critical to underpinning all of this. They include having the right finance and data management systems in place to track where money is going (and to whom), and ensuring wider skills across the organisation (in areas like marketing and comms) are available to support this work, when it comes to things like coordinating market engagement events.
Organisational culture is hugely important
But where does responsibility for this bringing together of different specialisms sit? How do you incentivise this collaboration when it lies outside most job remits?
Part of this is about cultivating a shift in culture - helping colleagues understand the overarching goal and value of this work. It needs to be embedded into everyday behaviour, rather than being seen as an add-on. In other words, it’s landing the fact that this work falls on our collective shoulders, as part of a collective push.
Leadership is key to driving this change
Public commitments from organisational leaders are a brave – and necessary – first step in driving this kind of change. But pledging commitments is only half of the story; we must also deliver on them.
We all have a role to play in this: from cascading messages around the value of this work, and incentivising cross-boundary working, to being aware of system-level capabilities (and failures) that need to be addressed, such as how data and resources can be more easily shared.
It’s fantastic that so many of our organisations are committing to ambitious, outcomes-based partnership working in this way and we feel hugely privileged to be part of it.