On Saturday, I read an article in the newspaper which related to NHS tendering. The article was bemoaning the length of time it took to get a tender through and commence the work.

It claimed the Invitation To Tender (ITT) was due to be issued this summer with the contract to be awarded by November but it has been repeatedly beset by delays and I was intrigued by a quote from NHS England which said that "the tendering process needed to be robust to ensure suppliers could deliver the required functionality".

The contract was to produce a Federated Data Platform aimed at reducing a backlog of 7.1million patients. I won't pretend to be able to deal with any of the NHS's ills; better people than me have tried and failed. However I was intrigued by the phrase in the quote "...deliver the required functionality"

So often when I have received an ITT I have been surprised at the amount of detail there is and when I have dug a little deeper too often I find the question being asked of the tenderer is either incomplete or has on several occasions asked the wrong questions and all this lengthens the time both to produce a tender and to ensure the right questions are being answered. Recently I received such an ITT and when I waded throught the masses of information it became obvious that the work they were asking me to tender for was completely inadequate as I would only be addressing a small part of the issues that they needed help on.

Too often the ITT lacks the holistic information needed so that where there is a specific issue they are trying to address the tendered lacks context and the project is taken in isolation with too often a super duper all singing and all dancing product which only solves part of the problem. Let's take just one example.

You are a manufacturing company wanting a new machine to replace an old one that was carrying out a specific process. Obviously you want a machine that could manage that process hopefully with the same or preferably better quality outcomes that is cost effective. But is that all you want?

Maybe you want it to produce more units per hour? Maybe you want to produce the same units in different sizes? Maybe you want the machine to be able to produce new lines or resurrect old lines that had previously proved uneconomic or maybe all of the above. Clearly the said new machine has to be capable of being adaptive to all these needs at a price that makes sense.

For a tender to be both effective and to be produced on a timely basis, the tenderer needs to understand both you and your needs and indeed whether you in return have identified all your needs.

So are the delays in producing the tender for the NHS because the tender process needs to be robust? Of course it does but are the delays because they are being asked to provide something that they think is not fit for purpose due to being asked to fit an ever expanding wish list that fulfills a variety of needs not all of which are actually necessary?

As far as the NHS is concerned I'll let the reader judge for themselves but if you are issuing a tender, whether its for goods or services, whether it's industry, commerce or the charity or education sectors, make sure you know that what you are inviting people to tender for fits in with your organisation holistically and doesn't create more problems than it solves.