Westminster Business Forum: Next steps for Public Procurement Policy 26th April 2024

 I am pleased to one of the contributors to the Westminster Business Forum event on 26th April 2024, looking at the next steps in Public Procurement.

I know that we have not even introduced the Procurement Act yet, but that is the time to think not only about what that is going to mean, but also about the future changes that are inevitably going to follow.

Luckily for you all, I shall only have a small role.  The event is online so no need to travel.

Full details are here.

Generation Recession

 "summer's gone" - Wake up Boo, The Boo Radleys

Well we are into September, and the future is not looking so bright we have to wear shades (Timbuk 3).  A long winter and probably a long few years are to come.  Figures in the news today suggest a 10% drop in real incomes over this year and next for UK households, some £3000 on average.  We shall be no better off than we were in 2003, despite high employment/low unemployment.

That money has to come from somewhere - and that means first of all from discretionary spend.  That new sofa, car, holiday, wallpaper - if it can be put off it will be.  Which means a hit to the retail and service sectors, followed by the manufacturing sector (or possibly lead by it).

My kids recently turned 20 and hopefully by the time they fully enter the workplace things will be better.  But it got me thinking.

My kids are really just becoming aware of the economy and business, so lets say that most of us really understand that when we have been working for a while, say when we are 25.  (I didn't even start work until I was nearly 26 - perpetual student!).

Assuming this current crisis can be resolved in about 5 years (it will be more than one) then we are talking 2027.  That is 20 years after the global financial crisis of 2007/8.

So, in 2007 people who were 25 might be aware of good times coming to an end, and then start to experience austerity, Brexit, covid, the 2022 cost of living crisis... By 2027 they will be 45 and be able to remember one or two good years for the economy a long time ago.  Anyone under 45 will never have known anything but tough times.  

Of course us oldsters will be telling our war stories about the times of plenty.  And be rightly ignored.  

We talk of recovery as a part of the business cycle, but realistically we have to be in boom before people feel recovery has happened, and those breathing spaces have been short recently.

We all know our early experiences in business have an influence on how we behave in our careers.  What will it mean for them?

45 year old should be the engines of business - a combination of energy and experience.  They will have known nothing but recession and depression.  Will they be able to imagine a better future?  Will their formative years set them on a path of limited risk?

The impact of these years will be not just economic, but psychological (which will also impact on the economy).

What will it do to business thinking and strategy?

I've no idea, but we ought to start thinking about getting young people to have the right mindset.

It would probably help if we stopped telling them they could buy a house if they gave up eating avocado toast (is that really a thing?) and recognised they are our future.  And they will pay our pensions.  I hope they have a booming economy to help them do so.

Anyway, have a good weekend.  Sorry if I am being gloomy.

CIPS Strategic Transformation - online - 4/5th October 2022

 I shall be running the CIPS online open training course on Strategic Transformation on 4th and 5th October 2022.  Full details are here.

We are in, to say the least, "interesting times".  And appropriately as well as a lot of tactical activity businesses are trying to re-evaluate their strategic choices.  The disruption of the past few years has lead most people to realise that business as usual refers to a past state of affairs that we are unlikely to revert to.

As an example, Working From Home (WFH) was a rarity and has now become the "new normal".  Of course, historically most people worked from home - factories and offices were new inventions a couple of hundred years ago.  But things changed, and change again, and while sticking with the previous strategy might be the right approach we should review it and check.

Personally, the move to online training has made me re-think how I work.

Hope to see you there, and hear your thoughts as well as discuss how to set and revise appropriate strategies for the future.

Possible future course on Re-starting supply chains.

We are already running some courses online, and probably about to start re-working some for the middle east market.  Looking at the courses made me wonder if there might be interest in a new course....

When things do start getting back to "normal", it will not be like flicking a switch.  A lot will have changed in the supply market, and particularly in the demand market.  Supply chains take a lot of work to make them Efficient, i.e. Lean.  Which means that they will not be Resilient.  So, our lovely smooth Lean supply chains are going to splutter into life rather than spring back perfectly formed.  There will be lots of blockages, broken links and delays.
Some businesses will be out of business - others will have changed their mode of operation.
Should we still buy from China?  Or should we develop local suppliers (who may be more expensive at first).
What did our contracts say about Force Majeure and what should they say for the future?

If you think there would be interest in such as course, please do let me know.  I am particularly interested in what you think should be covered, and whether we can do it in 1 day or will need 2.

Take care of you and yours.

CIPS Introduction to Public Procurement Bristol 25th April 2018

I shall be running the CIPS Introduction to Public Procurement course in Bristol in April 2018.  The next day is the Applying EU Public Procurement course, which follows on from the Introduction.  This time round we are not following that up with the Future of Public Procurement day, but that will be next run in Manchester in June 2018.  By which time the future of public procurement may have changed from where we are now - or may not.  That one needs regular checking and updating.

This course covers the basics of Public Procurement and so is useful for people joining the Public Sector, joining procurement, wanting a refresher, taking over running a procurement department or trying to sell to the public sector.  Or at least we often have delegates with those backgrounds.  If you are just interested, you are still welcome.

CIPS Public Procurement courses - Birmingham 20/21/22 February 2018

Next week I am running 3 days in Birmingham for the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply, covering UK Public Procurement.  The first day is the Introduction and is fully booked (next one is 25th April in Bristol).  Second one is Applying the Procurement regulations, and the third is the Future of Public Procurement .

3 good days, which can be taken as a block or one at a time - they are as standalone as I can make them.

The future of training and consultancy

Here are a few notes on the future of the training and consulting industries that I wrote for some of my colleagues in industry group.  I would be very interested in other people's views.

I know that on-line learning is becoming more prevalent but at least on a time scale relevant to us (say 20 years) I don’t think it is going to kill off face to face training.

I am not being complacent but have the following views;

1.      Online training sounds good but needs strong self motivation  - I know I am not doing as much on my on-line Arabic course as I should

2.      People have different learning styles and the interaction at physical events is appropriate to some – others will be happy with reading

3.      The time away from the office allows learning in a focused environment

4.      The time away from the office allows from a jolly day away from the office (a big thing in the Middle East!)

5.      It is not easy to codify all the relevant experience and knowledge

6.      Presenters can tailor material to audiences (currently) better than on line systems

7.      The interaction with other delegates is often beneficial

8.      Training is often quite a lot of fun – more than an online version

9.      The advantages of e-learning are cost, ease of delivery, and consistency of delivery.  However we often irrationally value things we pay more for more than cheaper things, and the ease of delivery may make it easy to put it off, consistency can mean a “one size fits all” approach – which as we know means it actually fits very few.

The same discussion can also apply to consultancy  - why don’t people just read a book instead of bringing in an expert?  In future will they just go to expert systems?  Many of the thing we consult about are actually known concepts – you can get them from a book – but there is (at least currently) an advantage to bringing in an external advisor.  In future it will be easier to get the data, but the knowledge of how to apply it will reside in individuals for a while.

So over time I expect there will be a big shift away from individuals to on-line resources, and the opportunities for people like us will come in developing and testing innovative ideas and potentially academic research (assuming students are also mainly being taught on-line).  But that is probably beyond my timeline.  The key differentiators then would probably be profile (people will pay for a world leading consultant), contacts (people will hire people they know), style (people hire “people like us” and people they like), and innovation (something new to give them an edge in a world where everyone has the same basic information).

William Gibson said “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.  I feel the same about knowledge, and see our role as helping the distribution process.  Books (paper or online) are not enough.

Your views may differ.

We live in a Science Fiction World

The pace of change around us is relentless, but often imperceptible.  The other day my son announced he needed a photograph to take to school.  This is a faff, but hardly a major issue apart from the fact that he announced it at about 20 to 9.  After a few seconds of panic, I realised the answer - quick photo on the iphone, then wirelessly print on his printer in his bedroom while he ran upstairs to fetch.  When I was his age the best we could have hoped for was a polaroid, or a photo booth.  Otherwise photographs had to be batched till you get roll developed which took about a week.  (how many were on a roll?  I can't remember).

These changes are hardly life changing, but just a sign of how much things move on and we don't really notice.

Last week there were a couple of inputs on the same topic by Penny Arcade here, and Warren Ellis here.
Let me cut and paste a small section of Warren Ellis's talk...
"
There are six people living in space right now. There are people printing prototypes of human organs, and people printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh and the human electrical system.
We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got robot legs controlled by brainwaves. . .
Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of computing power and an eight-track tape deck."

I recently read 25 things you need to know about the future, but Christopher Barnett.   If you don't know what is happening in the 25 areas he discusses, then you owe it to yourself to find out.  Otherwise the future will creep up on you unnoticed even more.  And it is amazing!

Timeline of the future

As the great Yogi Berra said “it’s very difficult to make predictions – especially about the future”. However that does not mean that we should not try to. It can help to shape our business strategy, protect us from shock changes, and besides it can be great fun.

Myers Briggs personality profiles suggest that only 20% of are mainly focussed on the future – 40% are focussed on what we learn from the past, and 40% on the here and now. That is pretty much what you would expect from human beings who evolved in the Savannah - too much dreaming of what might be is not much help in escaping lions, and in fact it might get you eaten.

The same applies in business – not learning from the past, and not focussing on the immediate threats are fatal for businesses. However there is always a need for at least a few people in a business to keep scanning the horizons, and thinking about how things change.

The old metaphor about boiling a frog is appropriate for our attitude to change. Today the internet is pervasive in our society – and most of us forget that a matter of a decade ago it barely existed. Most of us have mobile phones, and we have forgotten what we did before them. Films from the 1990s can feel strangely dated when the central problem could be easily solved in the characters had mobile phones, let alone Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

This makes it difficult for us to think about some of the major changes that can happen to our industry. The rise of 3D printers, which seems like a science fiction technology but is being used in aerospace, changes a lot of our ideas about manufacturing (see The Economist). The internet is of course changing other industries, and in some cases making them redundant – I can’t believe there is a major future in printing yellow pages telephone directories or CD pressing plants.

So what industries will remain unchanged?

Well haulage and distribution will still be essential to move some goods around – despite 3D printers, we are still likely to need to move chemicals and similar raw materials. However it may change significantly within a generation to include much better IT based planning and even more significantly robot driven lorries (it is on the way, trust me).

Television, if we continue to call it that, will probably merge with the web, and be shown on the sort of printed electronics paper thin screens that I have mentioned before.

My industry, consulting and training, will no doubt be changed by intelligent systems and training on demand media. I think though that will always be people who prefer to engage with (flawed) individuals rather than a (perfect) computer database.

Health is changing massively – our life expectancy rises by about 3 months every year. Think about that. The consequences are massive – and not just for pensions. This is a societal change that we don’t notice happening even though it is happening rapidly. Partly this is because medicine is advancing so fast – people live who would have died a decade ago, and people are born who would not have existed 30 years ago (including my children).

Prof. Bryan Cox in his Wonders of the Universe TV programme has reminded us that planet earth will one day be destroyed by the sun. Luckily that will be in about 6 billion years, so no need for us to worry just yet.

Trying to think on that timescale can be fun – when you think that human beings have only been around for less than a hundred thousand years. Will people in the year 3011 even be recognisable to us as people? A website providing a timeline of the future can be a way of stimulating thinking, and broadening our horizons (click here) – as can thinking about the Clock of the Long Now (see the picture for the prototype). I don’t agree with all of their projections (some I think will happen much quicker, others not at all) but that is not the point. It won’t tell you what will happen to your industry next month, or even next year, but it does help us stop thinking that the future will be just like the past.