I spent a very frustrating day trying to explain the difference between ‘MEAT’ and ‘the cheapest bid’ to a very nervous civil servant. MEAT, if you haven’t come across it, means Most Economically Advantageous Tender.
I had been called in by a senior responsible officer (SRO) who was growing increasingly concerned the team running the procurement competition were fixated on choosing the cheapest bid. As far as they were concerned, all they needed to do was to check that all bids were compliant, and then find the cheapest one.
The SRO, on the other hand, was responsible for delivering a solution to his Department – and knew very well what had happened in the past when a project had failed to deliver. Only two years previously, his former department had gone out to market for a managed IT service. The system was complex and had huge variations in demand levels. Furthermore, if any major part of the system failed, peoples’ lives could be put in jeopardy. Every time he tried to explain this to his colleagues, they pointed out that in such an eventuality, they could make a claim against the contractor! He wanted me to support him in a key programme meeting where he would explain why a refund would not compensate for public deaths.
There are many projects in both government and commerce that have these properties – they are not just limited to IT type projects. Most people can be persuaded that they are dealing with a high-risk project by posing a simple pair of questions:
- What would be the impact of the project failing to deliver the benefits required?
- How much would you need to save, to make that failure look like value for money?