Although most of us might not think about procurement on a regular basis, there are some whose professional careers are built around it, and they don’t just “buy stuff” for an organization. Their job also involves implementing techniques and tools to ensure that money is being spent effectively, equitably, and responsibly.
Here in Syracuse, we spend a big chunk of our budget on purchasing goods and external services: everything from office supplies to hiring consultants to audit a specific department, to multi-million dollar construction projects. Given that we are a major spender in our community, it's about time we take a long hard look at our procurement practices and ensure that we are cultivating vendor diversity, equitably distributing our resources, and continuously achieving improved outcomes.
But this is a tall order to fill when you stop to think about all the complex policies, laws, processes, people, and functions that go along with procurement.
Recognizing this, Bloomberg Philanthropies launched a new program to support cities that want to rethink and revamp their procurement practices and systems. In collaboration with experts at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab (GPL) and the recently launched Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation (BCPI), the selected cities receive a million-dollar grant and two years of support to transform city procurement.
Syracuse eagerly answered that call.
Alongside our aforementioned experts, the City of Syracuse built an interdepartmental in-house core team of procurement enthusiasts from various levels and departments of the organization who each play an integral part in the smooth functioning of the City’s purchasing process. Over the second half of this year, we have had the fortune of working with our GPL Fellow Mia Capone, who will spend the remainder of the two-year program pulling things apart and putting them back together. Together - this collective “we” is leading the charge to transform procurement within the City of Syracuse.
Syracuse Procurement Team
Learning from our peers
Before we started chugging away full speed ahead, the BCPL and the GPL hosted a Procurement Summit for us and our sister city in efforts, Seattle WA, to help us get on track and pumped for this work.
The summit was hosted in Seattle, where we spent two days learning new tools that can help lead us to success, and connecting with and learning from our peers. The GPL and BCPI set an agenda for us filled with keynote speakers that shared their experience and expertise for procurement practices, reviews of the innovation and human-centered design process, and a practical role-play exercise.
To better demonstrate the impact of using human-centered design and innovation techniques to improve the quality of proposal submissions received from vendors, we participated in this role-play activity to help us empathize with the vendor’s experience when responding to a solicitation.
Let me explain how it worked - the room was first split into two different groups, and each was given a different-colored paper with specific instructions on the roles we were playing, business owners applying to a solicitation from “Statelandia”, a fictitious municipality, along with directions on how we can submit our bid. We were given a tight time limit for submission, and we even had some folks who were reviewing submitted bids for requirements and rejecting them in real-time.
As the clock began ticking, one group noticed the other group doing some really odd things (such as walking backward) while attempting to submit their bids. Once our time limit was up, our facilitators asked us some general questions about the bid itself, which demonstrated to the group that how the bid proposal information is presented is critical. We also learned that there can be unnecessary steps or requirements that might seem “normal” to us, but to the person submitting the bid, can be confusing and frustrating. Overall, the role-playing activity really drove home to the group the importance of how we share information and really being thoughtful in what we ask of our vendors and why we are making the request.
The summit was also an opportunity for us to begin planning our project work utilizing a product roadmap with expert guidance and support.
Roadmapping our procurement revolution
As we have renamed it in Syracuse, “The Procurement Roadmap” is a tool that has become a shared source of truth for the project team that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product or, in our case, products over time.
This enabled our team to identify some quick wins for the project, as well as what efforts will require bigger lifts. The activity itself prompted our team to think more strategically about the timeline to progress our workstreams, the chronological steps to achieving our products, and the interdependencies in the numerous activities.
Our Procurement Roadmap has enabled our team to step back from all the digging and discovery of the problem identification phase of the project, to identify what it is that we really want to do with this project and how we will get there. What is it that we want to “make” and deliver to our customers? During our time in Seattle, we got expert support and advice from folks on the BCPI team as we put the pieces of our procurement roadmap together, however, it was only the beginning. Since we’ve returned home to Syracuse, we’ve finished fleshing out our map and continue to update it weekly. We’ve also printed our roadmap out and posted it in the project team’s meeting space as a visible reminder of our collective work that will continue to guide and ground our daily efforts.
Rolling up our sleeves
So now that we’ve returned home, pumped and ready to revolutionize procurement for the City of Syracuse, what happens next with so much to be done?
Getting started on a project of this importance and impact started with building a team to support the effort as well as our capacity. Our project team consists of staff from our Budget, Purchase, MWBE, Digital Services, and Finance departments; and now that Mia has joined us here in Syracuse she rounds out our team as powerful addition with her ties to the GPL and BCPI teams who are also supporting our efforts.
With our team in place and our challenge identified, our next step was to identify what our long-term goals for this project would be; what do we want to get out of this? We broke this bigger picture work down into 4 workstreams that we aim to progress simultaneously; they include making improvements to procurement planning, streamlining and digitizing (where possible) procurement systems, building capacity within the city for results-driven contracting, and improving the equity in our contracting.
Right now we are focused and working on building capacity within our purchase and MWBE offices; which is critical to ensuring daily operations continue and in ensuring that we move the needle for our project work on schedule. We’re also currently drafting a new procurement manual that will serve our internal departments and will inform and guide them through the new procurement forecasting tool we are building out.
We intend for this collaborative effort to provide more support to city departments, improve our internal workflow and assist us in more targeted vendor outreach for contracts. Our forecasting tool pilot planning is underway as well which we intend to launch sometime in the first quarter of this year. We’re also nearing the finishing line in taking our MWBE certification application digital and building out a repository of active MWBEs certified with the city.
In the near future, we’ll be looking to strengthen the city’s equity approach and programs as well as our compliance processes. We are also planning to pilot results-driven contracting (RDC) strategies for our bid and RFP processes by way of innovating pieces of the current process, creating new templates and forms, establishing vendor performance monitoring, and improving contract management across the city. We’ll also plan to digitize and standardize these processes when appropriate.
In short, the procurement revolution will keep us busy but we are so excited to be doing this work.