James Taylor, Delivery Manager behind Cyd, rounds up where we are and most importantly where we’re going, as we continue to work at delivering a procurement centre of excellence for Wales.
Defining the procurement journey
Our recent website efforts have focused on developing ‘the procurement journey’, and over the summer the beta website was launched, with advice and guidance for procurements estimated to be under £25k (we called this ‘route one’).
Our plan had then been to move onto procurements estimated to be over £25k but less than the WTO GPA threshold (‘route two’), and then finally onto procurements estimated to be equal to or above the WTO GPA (‘route 3’).
However, following feedback from the community, we have reflected on threshold values differing across the public sector. With this in the front of our minds we’ve started reviewing the draft content that was previously prepared for ‘route two’ and now plan to move away from organising content under routes. Instead, we are going to test a flatter structure, where various levels of advice are combined using navigation/filtering options to allow users to access only what they need to at each step of the procurement journey, depending on the overall value/risk/difficulty of the procurement.
We’ve been talking more about this in our Show and Tells, and we plan to share a wireframe prototype of what this looks like at the Procurex Wales event in November. The concepts will also be tested with the community.
We also realise the community needs better and more intuitive support navigating the significant changes that are on the horizon (e.g. Procurement Reform, and Social Partnership and Procurement Act) – we’ll therefore look to respond to these needs as a priority too.
Beyond the journey
Moving on from the procurement journey, additional Cyd services are also developing in the background and are being iterated. Plans over the coming months include:
Options for future governance and operating model
- Continued development of the governance and operating model to ensure changes to Cyd services are made in a community led and controlled way, where the impact is fully understood, and quality standards are maintained and preferably exceeded.
Measuring performance outcomes and acting on them
- We will continue to use feedback and technical analytics to further help us understand how users engage with Cyd services, and to what extent goals set by the community are met.
- We will continue to define and agree measures of success for services, and understand how service performance can be measured outside of the website (e.g., use of surveys, communications and engagement opportunities, and test-group feedback).
- Measures will be consistently applied, and through feedback will be used to set expectations amongst users and the wider community.
Learning and Capability
- We will continue to build and develop a convenient place where people can:
- Find learning and development resources.
- Find resources (case studies, toolkits etc.) linked to specific stages in the procurement journey – for context and relevance.
Integrating other initiatives and digital services with Cyd
- We will increasingly work with the Welsh Government procurement reform team to provide valuable content and insight for the Cyd community on the pending changes.
- We will continue to support the engagement, promotion and uptake of services developed within the Procurement Digital Action Plan.
- This includes signposting staff to new pipeline functionality that has been built in Sell2Wales and a new policy mapping tool that is under development.
User engagement, research and testing
- We will continue to apply a user first service-design approach to our services and for user testing.
- We will continue to run and publish Cydrannu learning webinars. Existing webinars in the series include:
- We will continue to work in the open and share our experiences via our show and tells which provide updates on the progress of Cyd and related projects.
- Blog posts will continue to be published to share experiences from across the community.
Cyd is still in alpha, and as such it isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t do everything that we want or need it to do. Only by working together and through continually improving the service one bit at a time will we be able to create the service that everyone wants and needs.
If you have any suggestions for future Cyd services or any feedback on the current services, please let us know at hello@perago.wales.
Thank you!
Over the summer the Cyd website entered beta – read more about the changes in our earlier blog: The new Cyd site is live | Tell us what you think https://cyd.cymru/the-new-cyd-site-is-live-tell-us-what-you-think/.