Plan an industry engagement

Planning achieves greater efficiency and better outcomes

Good planning can:

• set boundaries and expectations around the nature of what you’re doing and what you want to achieve
• provide a process for assessing and managing risks
• accurately forecast the resources you’ll need
• set a realistic timeline
• clearly communicate your objectives and process to suppliers.

Know what to consider in your plan

The level and type of planning you undertake should depend on:

• the subject matter of the engagement, and
• what you want to achieve from the engagement.

For example, you may want to understand a market’s dynamics and structure. For a broad investigation like this, you probably won't need as much detailed planning as a targeted industry engagement that's part of an ongoing procurement.

Generally, as part of your planning, always consider:

• whether a market exists at all
• the fundamental economics, business characteristics and competitive framework of the market
• the supply and demand trends within the market
• whether the market supplies similar organisations and, if so, what their supply models look like
• the strengths and weaknesses of the NSW Government’s position in the market
• the resources available for conducting industry engagement
• any risks, including risks to concurrent procurement activities.

Understand what to cover in your plan

Proper planning means engaging both internal and external stakeholders to:

• provide insight and context into your agency’s needs and objectives, as well as into its engagement with the sector
• uncover likely challenges and encourage discussion within your agency about whether current services, products, or solutions really meet your objectives
• help you understand the limitations of existing products and solutions and any difficulties in managing suppliers
• uncover desired improvements, needs and outcomes.

Decide who will plan your industry engagement

In most cases, your agency’s staff are best placed to plan an industry engagement.

During planning, it’s important to engage with the people within the agency who use the goods or services under review. Frontline staff can usually give you important insights into:

• the history, characteristics and underlying features of your agency’s needs
• the what and why of current buying approaches,
• suppliers, products and services.

Using in-house knowledge and insights, staff can undertake basic research and analysis of the supply chain and the broader industry. This can include assessing current and potential industry and agency developments.

Understand the importance of background research

As part of your planning, use background research to help you better understand your position. Include any information you gain through this process in a NSW Government procurement knowledge database (PKB).

Make sure you detail:

• what worked
• what didn't work
• what solutions have and haven’t been effective
• any other relevant information.

Develop a 3-part strategy to underpin your engagement

Once you've developed your plan, you'll want to drill down in a specific strategy to underpin your industry engagement:

• part 1 describes what you will discuss in the engagement process
• part 2 explains how your agency will conduct itself during the industry engagement process
• part 3 describes how you expect suppliers to act.

Part 3 is especially important for suppliers who haven't previously supplied to NSW Government.

Always communicate the relevant parts of your strategy to suppliers before you being the engagement.

Set clear expectations around how agency staff and suppliers should behave, including communicating the importance of the supplier code of conduct and expectations around supplier relationship management.

Include innovation in your strategy

To make sure your strategy encourages innovation, consider:

• whether each engagement exercise provides scope for innovative procurement approaches
• plans for dealing with these approaches if they emerge
• whether your procurement processes are open to innovation
• whether your engagement encourages the market to offer solutions that are more productive, a better fit for NSW Government's needs, more cost-effective and resource-efficient.

The more detail your can provide about future needs, the more likely you are to encourage innovation. Be aware, though, that innovation brings its own risks, especially around intellectual property.

Read more about intellectual property on IP Australia's website.

Next steps: identify risks

Make sure you're across the potential risks for your industry engagement, and include risk mitigation in your plan.

If you're unsure about potential risks, we recommend completing our procurement risk management training.