Implementing Innovation in Global Procurement
Background
The Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) has a goal to help frontline procurement reforms to get measurable impact in terms of better goods, works or services from open contracting. After 5 years of practice, OCP tasked Reboot with supporting the development of a new program for the organization. Their goal was to increase the impact of their support, but weren’t sure how to do so.
Reboot worked closely to co-design a new program entitled Lift, OCP’s first impact accelerator. This program brought together 5 procurement teams from around the world to learn new methods and strategies to improve on their work quickly. Reboot has since been supporting the implementation of this first cohort.
You can read more about the program here.
Client: Open Contracting Partnership
Context: Reboot
Role: Technical Advisor, Workshop Designer, Design Methods Facilitator
Timeline: September 2019 - present
Focus: workshop design; design research; training
Workshop Design
When I joined this project, Reboot had already researched and designed the program and was in the initial stages of implementation. We used the outputs from Reboot’s previous work to design two intensive week-long workshops for the program; one to kickstart the program and another in the middle to reinvigorate the program during its trenches. These co-creation workshops were intensive, all day experiences, and introduced the human-centered design process to many of these practitioners.
I designed many of the activities, including the many worksheets and process tools the teams used and took home (examples above). These activities were integrated throughout the workshop agenda to push participants to
Technical Advisor to Government Teams
The main focus of implementation has been around supporting teams in the execution of their work. This included an initial phase that taught design research, strategic communication, and prototyping skills. I worked closely with the teams to deliver this training to support the expansion of their practice.
This included providing office hours to teams as they developed internal and external surveys, editing and prompting tools they developed, and the initial training of materials through presentations and workshops.
These processes were typically very new to government practitioners. Still, many took this work and incorporated it into their processes and planning. For example, the Buenos Aires team has integrated surveys, interviews, and shadowing their stakeholders to support the design of their small business support program, while the New Orleans team is using similar techniques to improve their internal systems.
Impact, Outputs & Lessons Learned
While this program is still being implemented, some highlights have emerged:
The Lift team from Buenos Aires initially only had data and management practitioners from the same department on their team. Through Lift, the team realized that achieving their goals of increasing SME participation would require strong buy-in from other departments. So the team invited staff from the procurement and economic development departments to join their team. By expanding their core membership to co-design the reform plan together, the team established meaningful cross-departmental collaboration and created a stronger plan.
Moldova’s Positive Initiative is advancing with their project to improve medical procurement, in particular by making the procurement of high-quality medicines for HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis more efficient. They are working to do this through user research, advocacy, and strong purchase data.
Besides the teams, OCP has begun to plan for their second cohort, and are bringing in Reboot to help design it. The OCP team is also working to integrate the workshop design into other programming, creating an organizational wide toolkit based off of our work.