How is the learning and development being delivered?

The Cabinet Office has developed a portfolio of products aimed at different audiences. These include:

Knowledge drops
E-learning
Advanced course deep dives
Communities of practice.

Interestingly, most of the learning is focused at the buyer side, with a few Knowledge Drops aimed at suppliers. Therefore, this section provides an awareness to bidders of the training procurement teams will be going through, rather than an opportunity for bidders to join the training.

What the Cabinet Office is saying to procurement leaders

The Cabinet Office will be rolling out learning and development programmes for procurement and commercial teams. This includes contract managers, finance teams, service commissioners, legal advisers, and reporting teams. The Cabinet Office is asking all organisations to treat the Procurement Act 2023 as an organisational change programme and therefore consider:

Future pipelines of work in the next 12 months that would benefit from new flexibilities.
Review commercial strategies including planning, governance assurance and resources to enable the implementation of the new regime.
Consider who will attend funded training and work on the operational roll out.
Share the aims of reform widely with senior stakeholders and change makers.
Help communicate the changes with suppliers and encourage the market to embrace the Act.

The Cabinet Office wants to see all buying teams have a named individual in their organisation to be responsible for co-ordinating and championing the change.

There is a drive that buyers should be conducting early engagement with suppliers as a matter of policy. The Cabinet Office sees the use of the new flexibilities in procurement as fundamental to procurement reform and that commercial teams need to invest time in learning and development in order to get the most out of the transformation.

What the Cabinet Office is saying to suppliers

The Cabinet Office sees the new Procurement Act as a benefit to suppliers of all sizes, particularly start-ups, scale ups and small businesses.

It will create a single central digital platform for suppliers to register and store their details, with the ability for these details to be used for multiple bids. Through this platform, suppliers will also be able to see all opportunities in one place.

Commercial frameworks will be more flexible, so prospective suppliers are not shut out for long periods of time. This is just one of the methods the Act will remove bureaucratic barriers and level the playing field for smaller businesses, so that they can compete for more contracts.

The Act is seen as important to driving innovation, deliver better outcomes and embed transparency through the commercial lifecycle.

Knowledge Drops

These are designed for everybody as an on-demand resource, providing an overview of all the changes in the legislation. There are separate Knowledge Drops for contracting authorities, suppliers, and SMEs. Suppliers will gain an understanding of what the new regulations are and how it will influence how they do business with the public sector.

Communities of practice

Comprising of skilled and expert practitioners from contracting authorities, these communities provide a system of collective critical inquiry and reflection into the regime changes. Communities of practice will be ongoing, with events determined by local managers, teams, and organisations. The community of practice will build a library of best practice, including process maps, policy templates, FAQs, and case studies.

E-learning

Designed for the skilled practitioner within a contracting authority, these are self-guided modules for all procurement and commercial staff, providing a comprehensive grounding of the new regime. Modules include:

Scope, definitions, and general principles
Transparency
Procurement procedures
Competitive flexible procedure
Frameworks and dynamic markets
Supplier selection
Assessment and award of contracts
Remedies, procurement oversight and the debarment list
Contract governance.

Advanced course of deep dives

For the expert practitioner within a contracting authority, this is a 3-day interactive course, designed to create superusers within the procurement community. This course builds on the e-learning and provides deep dives on:

Designing the competitive process
Setting award criteria
Assessment and award
Frameworks and dynamic markets
Contract governance.