2. GDSOpen Contracting workshop
Digital Marketplace
Helping those transforming
public services by making it
simpler, clearer and faster for
them to buy what they need
14. GDSOpen Contracting workshop
Thank you
@wdangersmith
@GOVUKdigimkt
https://digitalmarketplace.blog.gov.uk
enquiries@digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk
Editor's Notes
We believe suppliers should be able to easily compete for contracts, with a presumption for transparent, web-based commissioning mechanisms.
These should provide straightforward access to products and services at competitive prices.
We want to work with suppliers to stimulate a responsive evolving market that contains the right range of products and services, the right people to provide products and services, and the right price and value for those products and services.
We want to build communities where suppliers and government buyers can learn from each other, to enable the delivery of the right project outcomes.
We want to work with suppliers to make the Digital Marketplace the default place for commissioning straightforward digital services and procuring digital and technology commodities.
The Digital Marketplace will be an end-to-end service that is digital by default, which supports self-service by users and enables suppliers to compete more readily.
As we look to make more of the end to end commissioning process digital by default
and lowering the barriers to entry for suppliers
we can’t ignore the contracts that govern the billions we spend every year on technology services.
We started by looking at the Digital Services 2 Invitation to Tender documents.
These comprise 12 attachments with >131,000 words.
Based on an average adult reading speed of around 250 words per minute, it would take roughly 9 hours of non-stop reading to get through them.
And that’s assuming that a single read-through would be enough to comprehend the contract.
At the moment, the Digital Services 2 contract documents contain over 80,000 words (roughly 70% is the framework Ts and Cs).
We organised a series of design workshops, with the aim of transforming the contracts that government and suppliers enter into.
We wanted to:
move away from contracts that are verbose, difficult to read, static, and assume delivery failure
move to contracts that are designed to meet user needs
start thinking of government contracts as data, to improve transparency and disclosure
Lots of hard work by a fantastic multidisciplinary team:
Digital Marketplace team
Complex Transactions
CCS Cloud and Services Category
Government Legal Department
Wider GDS creatives (designers, content designers, user researchers) and delivery managers
data.gov.uk
Clarity International
As well as drafting in plain English and removing unnecessary content we’re aiming for a 2 line limit on sentences, as advised by Clarity International.
This significantly increases the ease of understanding and reduces reading time.
Insights from user research showed that buyers and suppliers need easy access to important contractual information, without having to search through the entire contract.
To meet this need we’ll provide a summary at the start of the contract, highlighting the main points.
In line with the Procurement Policy Note 13/15 we want to make government contracts more open.
This will mean that the data in a contract, such as details of the goods and services being bought and total value of the award, can be more easily disclosed in a reusable and machine-readable format.
Data held within the contract will align with the Open Contracting Data Standard schema.
To reduce the length of the contract, we’d like to host ‘boilerplate’ clauses online. These are the standard clauses that don’t change.
We can then link to them from the buyer and supplier-specific contract, meaning that we publish them once, rather than reproducing them for every contract that’s created. We’re also looking at making the process less complicated by automatically filling out parts of the contract using the details defined in the Request for Proposal (RFP) stage.
We’ve started developing a prototype of the RFP process that will sit within the Digital Marketplace. We’ll be looking to link this with the creation of the call-off contract, following award.
We intend for this to be in plain English too.
