County Council – Case Study

The County Council’s management of its principle contractors had encountered some difficulties in performance and they felt it was time for a refresh of their Professional Services Framework.

The County Council invited Concerto to assist them in the reprocuring of a new Professional Services Framework, covering Project Management, Cost Managers/Quantity Surveyors and CDM(A).

• Concerto led the development and delivery of a new Professional Services Framework including the design, implementation, procurement, mobilisation and transition to new ways of working.    The project included the following key deliverables.
• Concerto began the assignment by engaging with internal staff and external suppliers to understand the historic issues and develop a picture of the as is . Understanding what has not worked in the past helps in understanding what could work in the future. It also begins to create an environment of collaboration and engagement.
• Constructing the framework in values bands: £0 -£5m, £5-£10m & £10m+.  Each value had threelots, one for Project Manager, one for Cost Manager/Quantity Surveyor &once for CDM(A), so 9 lots in total.
• Concerto developed a procurement approach called DeemedMarket Price (DMP). This model ensured that suppliers had sufficient rates tolimit any future add-on’s i.e. not going for the cheapest option only to be hitwith costs later, whilst at the same time providing the Council with a greaterlevel of assurance in their budgeting.  
• Using the innovative and successful DMP model, 63 initialsuppliers resulted in a core number of suppliers across all lots - 12 forProject Management services, 9 for Cost Manager/Quantity Surveyor and 4 forCDM(A)
• The Council did have scopes of services from its incumbent suppliers, but such was their delivery that the scopes of services were reviewed and in some cases rewritten. It was important for the Council to ‘own’ that piece of work however, Concerto did assist and absorbed that task as part of the overall management of the new framework.
• The Council had no formal KPIs with their previous suppliers.  Concerto developed a set of37 KPI’s/measures which covered a range of project activity and performance that can be critical in delivering successful projects, along with 10KPI’s/measures for use at a framework level. This is particularly helpful when a supplier is working across multiple lots.

The benefits achieved for the client in line with the agreed scope include:

• Greatly improved supplier base covering the Councils keyrequirements of PM, CM/QS and CDM(A)
• A new tender process
• A wide-ranging set of KPIs (which cover NEC4 and JCT) forthe monitoring of a supplier’s delivery of projects
• A set of Framework KPIs which enables the Council tounderstand how that supplier may be performing across the framework (all lots)
• Training for procurement, Project Managers and suppliers.