It’s essential that you consider how service providers will interpret and use your procurement documents. With timeframes to meet and the effort required to get tenders out the door, the less confusion for service providers, the better. After all, service providers are the primary audience of your document.

Given the cost of developing procurement documents, organisations need to take care to achieve the best possible outcome. Just look at what’s at stake: the commitment to a solution or service, with its associated—and potentially large—financial transaction, contract period and changes to business operations.

I hate flowcharts!  Harsh, yes, so allow me to explain …

As a means of mapping or modelling a process, socialising and refining it, and as a visual representation of it, flowcharts are hard to beat.  They make processes easier to define, understand and follow.  But as the final documented form of processes, flowcharts aren’t always effective.

It's not flowcharts per se that are the problem—it's that, often, they’re poorly drawn.  And that's why I hate flowcharts.

MS Word templates … do you use them?

When I say ‘template’, I don’t mean a single-paged document with a few headings that you have to try and craft a report from.  I mean a multi-paged fully-branded document based on a company-wide style sheet.  And I mean a structured document with standard headers, footers, sections, headings, and lots of instructions to explain what’s expected of the author.

So, why bother with templates like that?