18 March 2010 | Rebecca Ellinor

A radically different approach to recruitment is part of measures to improve procurement at Portsmouth City Council, head of purchasing David Pointon tells Rebecca Ellinor

You’re trapped in a cave with a group of strangers and water is coming in. There isn’t time to get everyone out: three people will die. You learn the profiles of the group (one is a multimillionaire, another is a vicar and father of five children, you know the sort of thing). Who do you think should survive?

The way you respond to this question – rather than the answer you give – could determine whether or not you get a procurement job at Portsmouth City Council. It is an example of a group-based morality game for candidates as part of a day-long recruitment process. Head of purchasing David Pointon describes it as the “crown jewels” of the competency tests that cover literacy, numeracy and IT.

Members of his team observe the debates and pick the two or three individuals who performed best in that and other exercises to come forward for an interview. “In terms of the people I have got here now, it has been spectacularly successful. The quality and potential have increased dramatically,” Pointon says.

This approach to new hires is just one of many measures that have formed part of a five-year strategy to overhaul purchasing at the city council.

Looking back

The changes began in 2004, which coincided with a fresh focus on purchasing in local authorities at a national level. Pointon, who has worked for the unitary council for 20 years, was one of only two local authority representatives to sit on the steering group of the government’s National Procurement Strategy, which was produced in 2003. Ideas from these meetings, and the new clout a forthcoming country-wide strategy brought, afforded an excellent opportunity for Pointon.

“All the top brains were saying what we should be doing to get good procurement practice and I was capturing all the good ideas, coming back and implementing them, so when the National Procurement Strategy began we had a head start.”

The council is responsible for providing education, social services, housing, planning, leisure and environmental health services to nearly 200,000 people who live in the area. So one of the first things Pointon did was to apply the Office of Government Commerce “gateway” process to procurement activity across the council. The gateway process goes from the idea stage (Is it a good one? Is there the money and political will to do it? Do customers want it?) through to pre- and post-tender steps, followed by a review at the end. Every sizeable deal at Portsmouth must now go through this assessment – and if you’re found to have skipped it you could get fired.

Pointon’s staff became the gatekeepers but found that these gates – the different stages of projects – were arriving ill-thought out. So, instead of simply acting as a checkpoint, the purchasing team was having to write or rewrite them on behalf of others, and the workload started to sink the small team.

“My personal philosophy is that procurement should be done as close to service delivery as possible. So when, for example, a housing tenant complains a tap hasn’t been fixed and they have been waiting three weeks, there is a very short journey between them and the person who manages the contract.

“So we came up with something that at the time was a good idea, but in retrospect was inspired: licensed procurement practitioners. We wrote to all staff to find out who was involved in the letting and managing of contracts and were shocked to find out that over 1,000 posts (about 320 full-time equivalent employees) were involved in the procurement process.”

Pointon’s team refined that to concentrate on core staff involved with services contracts, since £230 million of the council’s £250 million total expenditure goes here.

This stage identified 60 individuals – in transport, social care, leisure centres and more – carrying out contracting functions who would benefit from training. A skills-gap analysis discovered what each individual was missing, and now each one must satisfy a minimum competency standard. “They didn’t need to become procurement strategists – they just needed to know the basic rules,” Pointon says.

Training includes learning how to evaluate supplier bids, manage risk and encourage SMEs to compete. Most (90 per cent) of the 60 will be fully trained by the end of the month, a process that has taken two years.

The gateway board, which meets every Friday afternoon, has found the quality of gates submitted has gone up “exponentially”. “Before, we were throwing things out right, left and centre. Now it is very rare. It is more tweaking that’s needed. And it’s a good barometer that the skills training is working.”

All being well, from later this year Pointon may be able to spread work across this extended procurement community. “I have a small team of 16 people, but I have got 60 people that don’t report to me but are devolved around the authority to carry out that work. My role is to set the policy, implement the infrastructure and manage the process that is delegated to these 60 people.”

Overcoming resistance

Having ambassadors in the council who understand the purchasing process has been a boon.

“People were fed up of doing a lot of work, bringing it to us then getting it thrown out. Now they understand how to get it right first time and the perception of the process has gone up dramatically.”

And Pointon says that most were delighted to be “recruited” and trained. “We got them all together and the chief executive explained how important procurement is in different public services, and that they were the frontline troops. It went down an absolute storm.”

Getting the CEO on side wasn’t too hard either. “That was the good thing about the National Procurement Strategy. I used to go along and say ‘You should do this’, but when that came in I could say ‘This is the national strategy. You will be measured on this.’ And the leader of the council is nominated as procurement’s number one client, which is hugely valuable. When I take quarterly reports to the cabinet they are really interested because they can see the value of what we are trying to achieve.”

All tenders and quotes over £5,000 go through its Intend system where practical. This has significantly sped up the process over the past two years.

“Initially we were worried about contractors’ resistance to it, but now they know how quick and efficient it is. I think if we were to take it out we would have a mutiny on our hands.”

The Intend system also provides the council with useful management information, which has enabled it to identify a number of repeated contracts and set up framework agreements and reduce workload. “It’s a bit like draining the swamp. If we can start to take the heat out of the volume of stuff going through in all of a panic you can become more strategic.”

Strategic skills

The changes have enabled procurement to move into a more structured, strategic role. “We are heavily involved in private finance initiatives and public private partnerships and competitive dialogue – blue-chip areas of procurement in terms of complexity and knowledge. So now I’ve got people working on Building Schools for the Future work, nursing homes and leisure centre provision. Fifteen years ago you wouldn’t have been involved in things like that.”

However, Pointon had problems finding people with the right strategic skills to hire. “There are not too many strategic planners out there who have practical experience,” he says.

His answer was to target graduates from the city’s university and look for those with the right propensity to do the job – which includes excellent interpersonal skills. “There are a considerable number of people who go to university here, get qualified and want to stay, then fall into jobs rather than choose them.” So the council now advertises, hoping to find this kind of applicant.

“I am not recruiting them for the job today. I am recruiting them for the potential they have for the future. With that you get ambitious people. So as part of the deal, I get them in here, train them and pay them reasonably well, get them CIPS-qualified, give them the opportunity to promote themselves on a wider scale (for instance through national or regional work that I do), recognising that at some point that they are going to fly the nest and go into the procurement pool.”

And that turnover helps to keep the skills in his team fresh.

Last year the authority achieved £350,000 in direct cost reductions, and an analysis of activity going through the Intend system estimates there is a further £800,000 to save.

So has he noticed a change in the department’s profile? “No doubt at all. We got absolutely glowing reports from the Audit Commission. We are just going through the final process of bringing procurement under control in Portsmouth. It has taken five years because we had to look at the different tools and building blocks in the authority, get them in place and then start to manage the process, and we are doing that in an extremely positive way.”