Procurement can be challenging. New Zealand Government Procurement’s advisory team has deep cross-sector knowledge that can help your government organisation get results.
We receive hundreds of requests for procurement advice or support from government agencies. We can help at a range of levels: from questions around the Government Procurement Rules, to helping with the Treasury’s Better Business Cases process, through to high level commercial advice and planning.
The advisory team is experienced both locally and internationally in infrastructure projects, construction, ICT, healthcare, and social procurement. They have connections across government and the private sector. Public sector agencies can get in touch to have a confidential discussion at any point in the procurement lifecycle.
You can contact the team even if a procurement is well underway, but not proceeding as planned.
Our advisors are not consultants in the traditional sense but a team that is staffed by the public service, for public service. Instead of using a third-party procurement consultant, we can help government agencies with planning and running their procurement processes.
This is particularly useful for smaller agencies that may have limited internal procurement capacity. We can be your procurement team when you don’t have one.
New Zealand Government Procurement (NZGP) uses a cost recovery model for some of its advisory services. This is not to make profit, but rather to make the work we do sustainable over the long term.
This diagram outlines where costs may be recovered.
To help agencies get the best outcome from their procurement, we can peer review any document that sets out:
This could be a business case, a procurement plan or similar.
There are two specific instances where your agency may need help from our advisory team to review a business case or procurement plan:
In both cases, our reviews help with:
And in both cases, we don’t:
If your government organisation’s business case or investment decision needs to go to the Treasury, our team has the expertise to help with a preliminary review. Our reviews can get your business case ‘investment ready’. We can help you identify issues in advance, which could reduce reputational risk.
New Zealand Government Procurement, as the system lead for procurement, may inform Treasury of any issues we find in a business case, regardless of whether the agency has requested a review. Proactively engaging our team in advance results in a smoother process overall.
Under Rule 22, we review procurement plans that are requested by MBIE for review. This may include procurements that have:
Email your procurement planning document to the Procurement planning team.
If you’re not sure whether your document qualifies for a review, we can advise you on this.
We recommend sending your documents to us at the draft stage. We aim to give feedback within five business days of receiving your document.
Documents are submitted to us in confidence and not published, though we might ask your permission to share them internally or with other system lead agencies for input if needed.
When giving advice and feedback on your procurement planning documents, either for a Treasury process or significant procurement, we consider a number of factors.
At a high level, we look to confirm that:
Regarding costs, we’ll check that:
We also look for robust and suitable:
This checklist outlines the criteria we use when peer reviewing significant procurement plans.
Every government organisation should have a procurement policy that is reviewed regularly. Guidance and a template is available on how to do this.
How to write a procurement policy
For more detailed advice on what your policy should include, or help with developing an overarching strategy that drives the policy, contact our team.
We also have members of our team with particularly strong skills and experience in governance. They can join governance boards for your large or complex projects, to steer and guide your organisation to a successful procurement.
We offer an ‘experts for hire’ service, formerly known as the Commercial Pool. Our experts can come work alongside your team to deliver large or complex procurement projects. For example, if your procurement only happens once every ten years and you don’t know where to start, consider using this resource.
We have a track record of delivering successful outcomes by:
We are client-focused, actively becoming part of your team while working to your requirements so the end result is 100% yours.
With our experience, we can reduce and mitigate any risks your project has, helping maintain the confidence of your team, your agency and your minister.
Our embedded support covers all stages of the project lifecycle to ensure successful delivery. We can:
Projects we’ve supported span the full range of sectors, including property, construction, ICT, health and social services. We work with agencies across central and local government.
We recover costs from this process, but it represents significant value especially when compared to third party consultants.
Contact us to discuss whether embedded help is right for you.
Our advisory team can provide specific advice on supplier relationship management. This advice can be useful at any stage of the procurement lifecycle. Good supplier relationship management can help prevent complaints or contract breakdowns, and can help you get better value from a contract over its lifecycle.
For advice on supplier relationship management, email us.
There’s also a Supplier Relationship Management Toolkit available, which has useful guidance and templates.