Overview
In public sector procurement, choosing the best suppliers is key. With suppliers poring over specifications to find the meaning behind the text, every word counts in specification writing.
Clear, concise, and comprehensive tender specifications ensure that you save time, avoid costly errors and achieve your desired outcomes easily.
This Successful Specification Writing course is structured around real-life examples of best practice and will provide you and your team with the key skills, structure, and strategy to ensure you produce successful specifications every time.
Attend this interactive course to ascertain what it entails to make a successful specification, learn how to write to be understood by potential suppliers, gain techniques to plan and evaluate a specification.
Gillian King is a highly experienced procurement professional and trainer, with over 20 years’ experience in global procurement and supply chain management, working for government and multinational corporations in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Her sector experience is as a procurement professional, initially with the Civil Service in the UK Home Office and later as a global category leader for Zurich Financial Services, where her group annual spend was in excess of $400 M.
More recently she has provided consultancy and training to international government and ‘Blue Chip’ organisations in Abu Dhabi and Singapore, specialising in ...
Learning Outcomes
- Understand what makes a great specification
- Learn how you can produce a professional specification that gets across the outcomes you need
- Re-evaluate your current practices and discuss barriers to success
- Acquire a range of techniques to ensure your writing is clear, concise and has an effective structure
- Discover best practice through evaluating real-life examples
Agenda
Registration
Trainer’s Welcome and Clarification of Learning Objectives
What Makes a Successful Specification?
- Ensuring your specification meets your aims
- The key components of a clear, concise specification
- Discuss the barriers to good specification writing
- Dissect examples to discover best practice
Writing to be Understood
- How to avoid ambiguity, nuance and misleading questions
- Effective structures and vocabulary to use
- Practical exercises to re-draft unsuccessful examples
Morning Break
Planning for Success
- How to identify stakeholders and involve them in the process
- Define the need for contact
- Practical exercises using stakeholder grids
Lunch
Researching the Market
- Effective research for possible suppliers and solutions
- Know the market and what’s possible within budget
- Use case studies to identify best practice
Evaluation Criteria
- Identify and set clear evaluation criteria
- Ensure you have unambiguous objectives
Afternoon Break
Providing Clarity
- Clarifying the scope of projects to suppliers
- Ensuring the right suppliers are attracted to the process
- Practical exercises in answering supplier question
Workshop: Specification Writing in Action
- Bring together the day’s learning using practical exercises and group discussion
- Critique real-life examples to ensure you leave the day confident to write a truly successful specification
Feedback, Evaluation & Close
