Cyd Sandbox Procurement Toolkit

In Wales, the public procurement landscape is changing fundamentally due to the collection of reforms, which incorporates the various legislative changes that will affect the way that public procurement is undertaken by Welsh public bodies. This includes:

• The Procurement Act 2023;
• The Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023; and
• The Health Service Procurement (Wales) Act 2024.

These pieces of legislation provide an effective framework for procurement in Wales. Alongside the Wales Procurement Policy Statement (WPPS) and the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, these will ensure that the public sector is in the best position to use procurement as an effective lever to achieve the policy ambitions in Wales.

To support the Welsh Public Sector community with navigating the procurement reform, whilst ensuring their procurements are built with the well-being of future generations in mind, the Cyd service team has designed the Procurement Sandbox. Following a successful inaugural Sandbox session held in July 2024, the Welsh Government sponsored Cyd service is offering to run a limited number of tailored pilot sessions for public sector organisations in Wales, which will be held between April and November 2025

As the Cyd service team are delivering the Sandboxes, a toolkit is being developed that will be available through the Cyd website to share the learning with the community. However, volunteers are needed to take part in live Sandbox exercises so that what is needed across the Welsh Public sector is clearly understood..

As part of the learning, a toolkit is being developed. The toolkit refers to the broad range of foresight and futures tools, techniques and exercises the Cyd delivery team could use during the Sandbox sessions, to help participating organisations to surface details relating to a particular problem. We do not use the same tools in every Sandbox session as each is tailored to the needs of the individual organisation. The table below provides a list of tools and techniques which can be applied during a sandbox.

 

Sandbox characteristics	Tools and techniques	Purpose
Understand and embrace change	Futures Wheel	A foresight tool that helps to explore direct and indirect consequences of trends, events, and emerging issues
	Horizon Scanning	Identify emerging changes that could have a big impact on a country or a specific sector
	Three Horizons	A horizon scanning approach to understand societal transitions
	Futures Triangle	An approach to engage people in conversation about broad forces that may shape the future
	Reframing	Understand the problem in a different way, that is not immediately obvious and constructively challenges assumptions
	Route Cause Analysis	Using models such as the Iceberg Model to analyse complex problems by moving beyond immediate “Events” or surface-level challenges.
Reimagine future possibilities	Causal Layered Analysis	A theory and methodology to explore the layers of change needed to truly transform and achieve the future that we want
	Scenario Development	An approach to broaden our understanding of how the future may evolve
	Desired Future	A tool that helps us to identify characteristics of the future. It helps us to think about a range of outcomes rather than one scenario only
	Matrix Policy Gaming	A simulation exercise based on role-playing
	Now,  next, later	A tool to generate ideas and enable the team to focus on customer (or user) needs and business opportunities, rather than deadlines.
Act decisively and collaboratively	Back Casting	A tool to develop pathways to the future starting not from the present but from what we need to achieve
	Change Agenda	Identify the transformations required to achieve the desired future
	Wind Tunnel Testing	A process to stress-test policies, plans and strategies

 

What is a Sandbox?

A sandbox workshop, designed and facilitated by the Cyd team, enables senior leaders and service owners to deeply examine procurement challenges. Through targeted exercises, participants will uncover key insights, identify specific areas of focus, and develop practical solutions. These sessions are designed for 6-12 attendees with the correct blend of service understanding, wider organisational understanding, leadership and seniority to discover, define and develop the problem area.

Whilst procurement teams naturally play an integral role in the procurement process, we want to see the requirement owners, line of business commissioners, senior stakeholders, etc, also in the room. This is important as, without them, the procurement teams are not able to take forward what they have learnt in the session, such as recommended way forward, changes to internal culture and processes or a solution to their problem.

A Sandbox uses a combination of anticipatory and participatory approaches to help teams deal with uncertainty and change, inclusively and collaboratively. ‘Foresight’ or ‘futures’ tools (see table above), techniques and methods represent a collection of approaches for systematically thinking and acting in long-term ways, typically under conditions of uncertainty (e.g. due to legislative and / or policy change, new and emerging technologies, complex areas of public service commissioning, etc). It differs from other planning approaches such as forecasting, which makes predictions based on historical data.

A Sandbox helps teams to do three things:

1. Understand and embrace change;
2. Reimagine a range of alternative future possibilities; and then
3. Act decisively as a collaborative, multidisciplinary and cross-functional team, with a newly charted path towards achieving the desired future state.

Community engagement and participatory scenario exercises (whether real, near-real or imagined) are key elements of foresight approaches to develop a vision for the future, and identify changes to make it happen.

Objective

Through facilitated Sandbox sessions, the Cyd service team aims to help public sector organisations in Wales to:

• Explore how to best leverage the competitive flexible procedure under the Procurement Act 2023, alongside legislation and policy that’s specific to the public sector in Wales;
• Achieve the seven wellbeing goals, five ways of working and four lenses of public value, as defined by the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015;
• Practically apply this legislation to improve commercial and procurement practices in specific areas of organisational expenditure; and
• Focus on innovative approaches and social partnership principles to deliver sustainable public value, fair work and wellbeing impact.

The Sandbox session involves identifying risks, dependencies, and issues that should be considered during the pre-procurement ‘Plan’ and ‘Define’ stages of the Cyd procurement journey, aligning with the WPPS.

The high-level findings from the Sandbox session are shared with the community via the Cyd website.

The intention is that each Sandbox session will support organisations by providing clear, tangible next steps for the organisation/s involved to use to drive progress not just for the topic discussed during the session but also other procurements in the future.

The Sandbox Scenario

Sandbox sessions can be based on scenarios that are either real (i.e. actual organisational specific characteristics), near-real (i.e. using synthesised analysis from research conducted with a range of organisations, without reference to any specific organisations included in that research) or imagined (i.e. entirely fictional).

We would use an imagined or near-real scenario if an organisation does not have an imminent scenario they want to use but want to learn new tools and techniques in approaching complex procurement problems. Therefore, the Cyd team can use a hypothetical scenario to help them with this. The first ever Cyd sandbox was a hypothetical scenario and worked really well – we based it on real problems faced by the Welsh Public Sector, as evidenced through actual research and analysis undertaken as part of the Centre for Digital Public Services’ Digital Landscape Review. Here is the blog post where we talk about the inaugural Sandbox session held in July 2024.

What’s key to the Sandbox approach is the inclusion of a diverse range of stakeholders (e.g. internal staff from across functional areas, service end users, suppliers, etc), irrespective of whether scenarios used are real, near-real or imagined.

After the Sandbox

Delivery of a Sandbox session should not be seen as a one-off exercise in isolation; it’s recommended that holding such a session marks the beginning of introducing (and eventually mainstreaming) new tools, techniques and working practices into an organisation’s commercial and procurement function, and other ‘enabling functions’ such as finance, legal, audit and risk, etc.

While the Cyd service team is neither set up nor resourced to provide hands-on support to individual organisations over the April – November 2025 period, it can provide a light-touch assurance role following delivery of a sandbox session including sending stakeholder feedback questionnaires, creating and publishing case studies, reviewing concept notes and follow up questionnaire’s/ interviews.

The Cyd Community

Each Sandbox session will provide a tangible example of exploring how innovative, user-centred design (UCD) concepts and new approaches can help to create solutions to a complex procurement or broader commercial problem. The learning from the Sandbox session will be used to provide an example of how a public sector organisation has approached their particular problem area, which can be used amongst the procurement community in Wales.

The format and structure of the Sandbox session will not only provide a framework from which to develop further sessions but also content that can be used across the Cyd communication channels to:

• Inspire the Cyd community to think differently about complex procurement and commercial problems
• Showcase organisations working in a collaborative way
• Point to ambassadors for Sandboxes and the creative UCD approach applied to complex procurement and commercial problems
• Showcase the learning from the Sandbox both from an approach perspective and on a range of challenging themes, which are likely to be recurrent across a number of public sector organisations
• Promote and generate a demand pipeline for further Sandbox sessions