Quality Procurement Strategy

Contribution to Willie Millers Blog on Urban Realms website. 

New York's Public Procurement has undergone a transformation over the last decade, which is of interest in this case. It recognised that innovation and quality was lacking in its publicly procured projects and that a fee bias in the procurement strategy was partly to blame for this. The new process is called Design and Construction Excellence (D+CE), NYC seeks to select firms based on qualifications, contemporary vision and experience, and to pay fair and reasonable fees for design services. The result has been to increase competition for City public projects by attracting a widerpool of entrants and securing higher levels of service. It is generally agreed that the quality of NYC's new buildings has increased as a result.  

A couple of key points are:

• Projects are given to appropriate sized firms, i.e. projects under 10 million USD are only given to practices of 10 employees or fewer (rational - these 'small' projects will receive more attention and involvement of a Director in a small practice than they would in a larger practice, therefore quality will be improved)

• Set fees for a project are published in the tender, then all of the tender submission is based on quality (rational - fee bidding / slashing reduces quality and time input, competitive element is retained in the quality submission, in the long term it improves the building quality)

• Uses peer review and Design Quality Indicators to assess quality of submissions and projects.

A full outline of the D+CE is available here.

I firmly believe that Scotland's public procurement could be adjusted to a new quality based model, to inspire better buildings, higher quality design services being valued and more innovation and creativity in Architecture and Design. The side effects of this change could see an increase in smaller practices, increase in design talent remaining in Scotland, increased enterprise and more younger professionals starting creative design practices. 

Matt