The Cyd ‘Procurement Reform Sandbox’: using foresight approaches to help deal with uncertainty and change

Helping public sector teams to prepare for procurement reform across Wales, with a twist…

A blog from Kseniya Shuturminska and Warren Smith, procurement and commercial experts from the Cyd team.

What’s foresight?

Foresight is an approach for systematically thinking and acting in a long-term and anticipatory way under conditions of uncertainty. It differs from other planning approaches such as forecasting, which makes predictions based on historical data.

Foresight tools help us do three things:

Understand change;
Reimagine what’s possible; and then
Act.

Community engagement and participatory scenario exercises are key elements of foresight approaches to develop a vision for the future, and identify changes to make it happen.

As procurement reform in Wales will drive behavioural and cultural change across whole organisations, the Cyd team wanted to start exploring how foresight approaches could help a broad range of stakeholders – not just commercial and procurement practitioners – to understand this change, reimagine what’s possible in public procurement, and then take practical action for the benefit of everybody.

Introducing the ‘Procurement Reform Sandbox’

On 17 July 2024 we held the first half-day ‘Procurement Reform Sandbox’ hybrid event, the aim of which was to turn legislation into practical action. This session presented a new live environment as a safe place to safely explore, learn, co-design, demonstrate and test the “art of the possible” in public procurement.

Brave colleagues from Natural Resources Wales, Social Care Wales and the Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS) agreed to take part in the session.

We began the day with some scene-setting presentations from:

● Cory Hughes from the Cyd delivery team on user-centred design; and

● Carl Thomas from Welsh Government on Procurement Reform in Wales.

The presentations helped our colleagues in the room and online to put themselves in the mindset of approaching a procurement problem in the near future, when the Procurement Act 2023 will be live, with a user-centred mindset.

We then took the attendees through our imaginary scenario (whilst imaginary it may be, the scenario may well ring true with many across Wales).

The scenario

Please note that this is an entirely hypothetical scenario that was developed for the sole purpose of delivering the outcomes of this foresights workshop. Any references to actual organisations or initiatives are purely for illustration purposes only.

Here are some extracts from the scenario:

Several organisations in Wales are facing the end-of-life for their current enterprise systems, such as finance, HR and payroll, and case management systems, which are critical for the day-to-day running of their organisations.

Through the publication of their organisations’ procurement pipeline notices on Sell2Wales, and in line with the Wales Procurement Policy Statement (WPPS), several organisations have identified opportunities to approach their shared challenges collaboratively.

There are a number of considerations that add to the complexity and risk profile of these digital transformation programmes, as well as a number of opportunities to think and behave differently to achieve the 7 wellbeing goals, 5 ways of working and 4 lenses of public value, as defined by the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015.

To make things interesting (or perhaps more challenging, because we love a good procurement problem) we defined some technical, commercial and organisational characteristics, both positive and negative, for participants to consider. These included:

Characteristics	😬	🙂
Technical	Poor user experience, manual / off-system workarounds Outdated systems, “burning” platforms soon to be unsupported Tightly coupled implementations, highly customised Several high risk security vulnerabilities	Work in line with the Digital Service Standards for Wales Several reusable digital public goods identified CDOs keen to experiment with new technological capabilities
Commercial	Contracts can’t be compliantly extended Very low contract management capability and capacity	Lots of interest from the market Broad supply of cloud-based off-the-shelf / open source software capabilities Strong interest in collaboration and multi-supplier delivery
Organisational	Constraints on budgets, recruitment and headcount Low capability and capacity	Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 Senior sponsorship for creating enabling environments for change Strategic pillars of transformation / digital strategies

The exercises

We then went through a series of exercises to think of and discuss both the worst possible approaches (to serve as anti-patterns, as well as a bit of an ice breaker) and the most promising approaches.

What we found at the end of the session might not be a surprise to our community. Whilst some of the discussion was around using the new competitive flexible procedure, most of what we talked about was good practices during pre-procurement planning. This included:

Understanding the skills gap that exists, to deliver an effective procurement and manage the contract;
Getting in front of the curve and searching early for opportunities to collaborate with other public sector bodies across Wales, and getting early buy-in from potential partners;
Developing an open and transparent user needs’ library for common services and service components, to help avoid unnecessary duplication;
Conducting effective, in-depth, open and honest early market engagements;
When developing specifications, reviewing what’s currently needed rather than reusing old specifications; and
Considering contract management needs at the pre-procurement stage, and involving contract management teams early in the design of the specification and procurement process.

All of the things the participants covered were about what opportunities come from good planning, collaboration and communication. People across the public sector are worried about the procurement reforms, but what they’re able to do as a result of these will not actually change significantly.

We concluded that the Procurement Act 2023 going live on 28 October 2024 represents a concrete date for change across all of the public organisations. But, ultimately, this change is all about:

Embracing new behaviours that encourage collaborative working;
Transparent, open, honest and early market engagements;
Multidisciplinary approaches to designing procurements and contracts that meet users’ needs; and
Driving greater social value through the consistent delivery of more well-being impacts.

This is just a brief overview of the Cyd Procurement Reform Sandbox, which is a repeatable and configurable foresights blueprint for future sessions, which can be used to explore the art of the possible in public procurement in Wales.

We’re going to be posting more about some of the discussions we had during the day and what the public sector should focus on, not only once the Procurement Act 2023 has gone live, but now.

What’s next?

If you’d like to run similar sessions in your organisation, let us know and we’ll share more about how we set it up, the skills needed around the table, and our learning on how it could be even better next time.