SPEAKER_00: 0:03

We're talking today with Colin Earhart with the Harvard Kennedy School Governance Performance Lab about the Procurement Excellence Network. A lot of triplet names in that. So Colin, why don't you introduce and talk a little bit about who you are, and then we'll get into some of these programs.

SPEAKER_01: 0:21

That's great, Dustin. And yeah, I'll do my best not to use too many acronyms today, especially the procurement space can get a little acronym heavy. But yeah, first off, I just want to thank you and the team for the invitation to join today's session. As you mentioned before, I work for the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab. I'm an assistant director here at the organization based directly in Boston, Massachusetts. I've worked with the organization for about five years now, off and on. I briefly left to work directly in Massachusetts state government for a number of years, but have since returned to lead our procurement excellence network. But as brief background on the GPL, then I'll pause. We are a research and technical assistance organization based at the Harvard Kennedy School that for over 10 years now has worked on government improvement projects with state and local governments across the country in a variety of policy areas that we view as some of the thorniest operational challenges in government. So spaces like criminal justice, child welfare, housing and homelessness, behavioral health, all areas that governments really face challenges to move the needle on different social outcomes. And it was really at the start of our work that we realized, I think, like your organization, the importance of procurement in empowering local government leaders to make progress on many of those goals and to better serve residents. So across all of our policy work, we actually now have a team specifically focused on procurement and contracting that has grown to become our largest policy vertical. We now have over 20 members of the team specifically focused on procurement and contracting. So I'll pause there.

SPEAKER_00: 1:52

Yeah, excellent. One of my cliches is, I came to procurement in kind of the last third of my career in government, but really was drawn to it just because if you like change in government, you need to love procurement because through procurement is where most of the funding and the policy initiatives go. And we need to make sure that people feel that they are empowered to drive the policy outcomes without fear that they're going to get harmed or create harm. in the execution of procurement. So there's lots of opportunity on how procurement can really be a strategic asset inside of these organizations. So talk specifically on the Performance Excellence Network. When did you guys start that? And how does it connect overall with the goals of why Harvard would care about this space?

SPEAKER_01: 2:44

Yeah, I appreciate that question, Dustin. So I'll take one step back, which is just to explain a bit about how our procurement team operates, and then we'll connect that to our Procurement Excellence Network. So Our procurement team for the last 10 years has supported governments in a variety of ways. Our traditional bed-and-brother approach was that we would actually work directly one-on-one with governments on more intensive procurement reform projects that we started recently calling extreme procurement makeovers, where we would have an embedded fellow working directly in a government trying to collaborate with that government on different projects. procurement challenges that they were facing, whether around process efficiency or trying to bring a more equitable approach to procurement or trying to make procurement more strategic or results-oriented, like you alluded to. And that's actually how I started my time at the GPL. My first role was being embedded at the state of Connecticut, and I got to collaborate with many of your colleagues at Civic Initiatives during my time there, where for multiple years, worked with multiple agencies to try to bring this more modern and results-oriented approach to procurement. But what started to happen, especially on these more intensive projects, is we were really excited about our results. We were seeing big impacts on different cities and states and counties that we were working with on a lot of key performance metrics that we were excited about. But ultimately, we as a research organization were concerned about how do we actually scale these lessons learned? What is the way that we actually don't just impact a handful of governments that we have staff to work with, but how do we actually reach a much wider ecosystem within public procurement? It was really with that that about three years ago, many of my colleagues started an effort to meet with folks in the public procurement ecosystem and think about what it would look like to create a virtual network that was focused on championing procurement excellence and really providing tools and supports in a scalable way. And it was through those conversations that we started to connect with folks at places like NIGP and the National Procurement Institute and NASPO where we saw that there was a lot of really great existing spaces that were doing similar things of bringing together procurement leaders. But we were trying to figure out how could we uniquely be additive to that space and really provide additional tools and features and community building initiatives that would support procurement reformers around the country. So that was really the starting point. And we officially launched almost two years ago now in November of 2022.

SPEAKER_00: 5:06

And so how does it actually take form? I know that you have cohorts, I believe, from at least the pictures and some of the discussions that you set up cohorts to meet and to work through problems. So, I mean, what's the actual kind of shape?

SPEAKER_01: 5:21

Yeah, exactly. So within the procurement excellence network specifically, we have really four ways that we engage with members. And when I say members, there's official members, which are folks who work directly in government, who register and sign up to be part of our community members. Other aspects of our network are fully available to the public, including folks that don't work directly in government. So we have a lot of features that you don't actually have to be a member and that you can leverage and use in any context. We have a lot of folks in the academic space, the nonprofit world, or even the private sector that will engage with our content. They're just not considered official members. But really, there's four main ways that folks engage as part of this community. As you alluded to, the first part is that we typically host different virtual trainings and roundtables about once a month on trending procurement topics and challenges that are really showing up with a lot of our procurement members. So as an example, we recently hosted a training around the challenges of central procurement departments trying to communicate messages and trainings to different user departments and how to get those messages to actually stick and not just give out laundry list of requirements and confusing policy guidance to user departments. So that was one of the recent trainings that we did. We often do other trainings on topics like bringing together members to share about their experiences, trying to address things like purchasing thresholds that are really complicating their ability to get services and goods and commodities in place in an efficient manner. So that's the first big bucket is we do these virtual trainings, bring together groups in these spaces. And we're really excited that typically we have anywhere from 100 to 200 folks that show up in these virtual spaces. The second is that we have this growing resource library of best practice publications and actionable templates that both share lessons learned from our more direct embedded project work. So again, from our 10 years of experience working more closely with governments one-on-one, we try to elevate a lot of the insights from those projects and share that through our publications. But we've also started to co-design with different governments, tangible tools and templates that folks who are trying to modernize their procurement processes can literally grab and go. We don't have concerns about intellectual property or people grabbing our content. We are encouraging government folks to take things like our RFP templates or our contract management templates or our evaluation scorecards, which can be really great starting points if folks are trying to build these things from scratch for their jurisdictions or if they're trying to figure out a way to level up some of their existing content. And then the third bucket, and then I'll pause, I know I mentioned before, but the third bucket I'll say is that For folks that are officially in our network, we have a very robust member directory and discussion board that allows for members to directly connect with their peers on different procurement challenges. So we actually heard a really fun use case recently where one government actually used our member directory to find folks with expertise in different procurement areas, such as IT procurement or sustainability, and literally built out a training curriculum for their staff by leveraging our network to bring in guest speakers. Those are probably the three primary ways that folks engage with the network.

SPEAKER_00: 8:35

You mentioned you've been doing it for a couple of years. So talk about how the network has grown and maybe a couple was wrong, but how has your network grown and how do you measure whether it's meeting the expectations that you've set for yourself on what you want to see out of the program?

SPEAKER_01: 8:53

Yeah, I'll tackle the first question first. So we've been really excited about the growth. Our team set what we thought was a pretty ambitious goal that within the first year, we would reach a thousand members. And we actually hit that number a few months in advance of that goal. And we're now reaching almost 17, or excuse me, we're almost about to hit the 1700 number mark of members, which we're really excited about. And what's equally important to us is not just the total number of members, But across our membership, this represents nearly 600 unique jurisdictions across all 50 U.S. states. And that means folks in city government, county government, state government. Increasingly, we're getting some folks from the U.S. federal government, as well as 12 different countries across North and South America. So it's really exciting. All of our members are folks working directly in government, in public procurement. And it's completely free for folks working in government, thanks to our philanthropic supporters. And there's really no minimum requirement for how folks engage. So it makes it an easy sell for us to try to get folks excited that it's really just this resource that folks can leverage in whatever way is useful for their government.

SPEAKER_00: 9:58

Anything else that you have on the variety of people that may represent some of the constituency? And then please go into kind of how you're tracking performance or success for yourself. Like, how do you measure performance? whether it's accomplishing what you expect it to.

SPEAKER_01: 10:14

Yeah. So, I mean, one of our goals in the upcoming year really is to try to make the membership even more representative of the communities we're trying to support and serve. So in the early days, a lot of our membership was anchored on governments we had worked with before or some of the larger cities or jurisdictions. We were getting a lot of folks from similar governments, but we've been really intentional in the last few months, especially around trying to reach more folks, more city governments, more county governments, more folks across the public procurement ecosystem to make sure that we're really representing a wide set of insights in the procurement space. And it's funny, we actually have this member map that we often update and show folks in the network That's just a visual of how the network's growing. It's all these little red dots that show members in different jurisdictions. And I personally find it just cool to see the red dots growing in a positive way. I know a lot of times maps can show things that are scary, but this was a positive map of seeing our network grow. But to your point around how we measure success, we really do try to center data in evaluating how we're doing as a network. At the highest level, we bring a results-based accountability approach to measuring our impact. So we're always thinking about three things, the quantity of how much we're doing, the quality of how well we do it, and then candidly, the effect of, does our existence matter? Are folks actually better off because there is a procurement excellence network? We're always thinking about those three buckets. So in practice, that means we track data to connect to those three buckets in a couple of ways. The first is that on a monthly level, we're always tracking network key performance indicators on things that relate to how folks are engaging with the network. So we're always looking at member growth rates. We're looking at how often our publications are being viewed in the resource library. We take a look at how our attendance rates fluctuate at our events. We often do surveys right after our events to see how much the content resonated with folks. We have different proxies for whether our network is helping folks in terms of their own challenges. the number of times people ask us for ad hoc assistance through pro bono coaching calls or to come and do a separate training that's separate from our official trainings. These are all these things that we're typically tracking on a monthly basis that are more input or activity oriented. But then the second bucket, and then I'll pause again, is about twice a year, we do a big push with our entire network to do a pen member survey where we ask very tangible questions about as a result of being a pen member, Have they done X, Y, Z? Have they shared an idea with a colleague around how to solve a procurement challenge? Or have they felt increased confidence in launching their own set of procurement reforms? Or have they actually started to initiate a specific procurement reform? And it's really through that data as well as qualitative impact stories that we try to collect through that member survey that we really start to know, does our existence matter? Are we hitting the mark in terms of really serving our community?

SPEAKER_00: 13:11

So maybe pick one. example from the work that you guys have done or one thing where you felt it really hit that mark. Some sort of a governance reform. We do a lot of work around governance reform. I find that governance, for example, is very hard to reconcile correctly because it's very easy to add governance because of one particular situation. But then in order to make people step back and say, we've built this to such a level that we can't actually meet the mission that we expect procurement to give because now we're so afraid of procurement that we're not willing to use it. So is there a particular example where you helped somebody maybe actually drive some sort of a conversation that was different than the one that was going to happen without you?

SPEAKER_01: 14:01

Yeah, so I'll share one specific example through the Procurement Access Network, and then maybe we can come back to this. I know we had talked about chatting about this criticality of elevating the importance of procurement and really talking about how both our organizations are trying to push that message. But in terms of specific activities that we've been really excited about with the network and how we've tried to really demonstrate that through our existence, it's been useful for folks, is I know I mentioned before, we traditionally host these monthly virtual events on different procurement topics. And we're gonna continue to do that. We find it as a really valuable space just to bring together hundreds of folks from our network on different topics. But we did start to realize that to really have impact and to meet that mission of having more skilled learning and multiple governments making tangible progress, we need to start to offer other initiatives that really resulted in clear impact. So we started to shift towards also offering smaller targeted group offerings that are more application based for really motivated governments, where smaller sets of governments would go through virtual cohort style learnings on specific topics. So as an example, we recently hosted a virtual boot camp with 10 different governments across city and county governments, all that were focused on how can they design and then ultimately distribute vendor surveys to better understand pain points that their vendor community was facing and interacting with their jurisdiction. So it was through that bootcamp offering that we actually were able to scale a lot of our lessons learned. We've often worked one-on-one with governments, but for the first time with 10 governments all at once, we could share some of our ideas, really troubleshoot challenges they were facing, and over multiple sessions, actually have them ready to release that vendor survey by the end of the bootcamp. And through that experience, we were really excited that a majority of the cities at the close of the bootcamp had already released their surveys and were starting to collect really powerful insights.

SPEAKER_00: 15:56

Well, I applaud you for doing that because without vendors, there is no procurement, right? And so if we consider vendors as partners in the ecosystem, vendors aren't going to win every time, but we need to make it be a robust, competitive field. And if We've done a particular thing because our risk language says we're supposed to have a performance bond, but it's atypical of the category that it's being bid in. We're not even realizing the impact that we have on vendors to be able to do what ultimately is the primary measure of success for a procurement event, which is we had multiple competitive responses because everything that you would want to have from the ability to negotiate, the ability to drive a particular topic comes from having a robust moment. I mean, that's not saying that you don't sometimes make choices to use co-op contracts or individual things because it's the advantageous path. But if you did go to the action of a full sourcing event, there should be a robust outcome from that. And being willing to understand what motivates vendors to respond, or what particular aspects of how to go to market makes a particular vendor say that solicitation isn't worth my time or the risk, only truly introspective procurement shops are gonna actually ask that question because a lot of times, otherwise the procurement shops going to just simply kind of wrap themselves in the comfy blanket of, well, that's the way it's always been. So therefore it must be good enough. So what kind of outcomes did you see out of that vendor exercise maybe that drove a mentality shift or a willingness to view vendors as partners in that conversation?

SPEAKER_01: 17:52

Yeah, so everything you just shared, Justin, really resonates. So two immediate thoughts. So the first, I think, to your point is a lot of governments are nervous about taking on this type of activity. They're fearful that if they put out a survey, all these vendors are going to share about how bad their experiences were working with that jurisdiction, and that will become known to other stakeholders within government and will really make that procurement shop look poorly with their peers. But we often don't really find that the case. A lot of times when these surveys get released, there's always mixed results, but there's a lot of really great affirmations and folks saying what they like around engaging with that procurement shop about their customer service approach or different aspects of what it's like to engage when they're going through a solicitation process. So that's the first thing is that We've always tried to encourage folks not to be scared. You're going to get mixed results, but there's often a lot of good that comes out of it. But then the other thing that I'll say, Dustin, to your point, because you even brought up something like bonding requirements, we often find that governments have a lot of hypotheses around why there isn't more competition on their bids, or they claim, well, there's all these rules and regs that make it hard, or we know we're always rushed, so our response deadlines are really quick, and that's why no one's competing on our opportunities. But the vendor surveys often... reveal really interesting insights about what's actually preventing people from responding more to opportunities where it may not actually be restrictive requirements or how long the open period is for a bidder solicitation. But it could be as simple as like, no one is aware of these opportunities. Like no one's registered for the, you know, notification portal. And they really are encouraging the government to just do a lot more outreach or use social media, get the word out about these different opportunities. Or they may say that the actual real pain point is that the solicitation opportunities are just too complex. The scope of work is really only meant for some massive mega incumbent. And if they were ultimately to unbundle or split these scopes into much smaller pieces of work, that could actually enable a lot more competition. So the vendor surveys often really reveal a lot of interesting insights about what reforms to actually make that will make a difference in terms of boosting competition.

SPEAKER_00: 19:58

Yeah, I have a speech that I've given many times called the five things I wish I knew, which was basically five things vendors should better understand about the buyer experience and the buyer should understand about the seller experience. And one of the primary points I make in that is that all good vendors who are capable are going to review your solicitation and in terms of risk and cost, because these things aren't free to respond to. It takes time to respond to. So what is my actual opportunity and what is the risk that is being presented to me? And the procurement shops, if they can look at and consume the information from the vendor community about what makes good vendors back away, your point about did they see it, that's a totally different point, right? So, but like, if there are things that make good vendors back away, They should want to hear that because do you know who doesn't review those responses for risk and cost? Desperate vendors, right? Desperate vendors. So your good vendors are going to say, I can walk away from this if this isn't a good shape. Your vendors who absolutely positively have to have that are going to charge in no matter what. And so you want the choice vendors to come in. And I've probably over-discussed this point, but it's a particular... passion of mine to really be open to the feedback so that we increase the amount of opportunity. And your point about whether we bundled something or unbundled something, I think that's a key part of having a strategic approach to procurement, right? It's not simply just taking the requirements and dropping them into the RFP template and saying that's good enough, but actually having a phase of the conversation that says, What sourcing options do I have available to me and what is most likely to produce the outcomes that the customer, in this case, the department is trying to accomplish? Is it multiple solicitations? Is it allowing people to say they support some of the regions, but not all the regions? Is it? a third-party administrator who sits over a lot of individuals. So really sort of saying, what is the sourcing event that will accomplish the goal and not simply I presented an RFP? That really takes a strategic mindset.

SPEAKER_01: 22:25

Yeah, and to that last point, Dustin, often what we find is there are a lot of governments that might have that really thoughtful planning process, but then the real struggle is how they convey that message in their solicitation documents because they have documents or approaches for how they release documents RFPs or bids that are just a ton of boilerplate content that could be dozens of pages where the actual attempt to explain to the vendor community what they're trying to purchase and how they're strategically thinking about this is buried in the middle of the document. So I think that's the other piece that we often try to work with governments is how do you actually better convey through your solicitation documents what you are trying to achieve and how you're looking for a partner in doing that rather than having that key point stuck on page 72 of this 200-page template.

SPEAKER_00: 23:08

Now we're deep into my five things I wish I knew speech, right? Because one of the things I say in there is, where should the statement of intent be in a solicitation? And then I wait until people answer, and then somebody says, the first page. And then I say, well, why isn't it, y'all? Because if I'm picking up a solicitation, and it has all the form and the content, and I have to scroll through 70 pages to see Let's say the solicitation was for consulting services and I have to open it up and scroll to page 70 to see consulting services for sidewalk design. Well, that was a waste of your time. It was a false signal to you that I downloaded the RFP that I'm looking at actually responding and it was a waste of my time. And so, you know, again, it comes from a courteousness and an understanding of the vendor experience to say, let's say what the solicitation is for. And let's say it early. And if my template doesn't allow me to present the SOW early, then put a statement of intent, create a statement of intent in the first two pages of the solicitation, right? This is intended to do this and it will save an incredible amount of time and it's just simply courteous. And so we can move on to a different topic, but you can tell I really care about the vendors being seen as the partner in the procurement activity because there is no procurement without a robust vendor community. So, so you recently talked about, or you guys recently did a post on some new things you're doing with the community resource library. I know you've talked about it some already. Is there more to say on the community resource library that you haven't said so far? You know, maybe recap briefly kind of what it is and what future plans you have for it. Sure. So as a bit of background, I definitely

SPEAKER_01: 24:54

want to thank you, Dustin. I know you've been one of the folks helping to elevate the new initiative. So appreciate that. But yeah, we're really excited about this. I know I mentioned at the start that one of our key features of the network is that we have this resource library that has over 70 tools, templates, publications that are all around different procurement best practices. And that's a distinct thing separate from our community resource library where we really started this initiative where we were getting feedback from our members that as much as they appreciated our resource library that was mostly coming from insights that we had from our own organizations work with direct governments. Folks were also just interested in seeing other model best practice documents from peers on a range of documents. So we basically used our membership now of almost 7,800 members to do an open call for governments to share their proudest documents related to a couple of different categories. So we piloted by first asking our members to submit documents that first related to procurement process map. So how were they, visualizing their procurement process within their jurisdiction to help communicate roles and how different functions interact with the procurement process. That was the first document we did an open call for. The second was examples of vendor surveys. So basically how, if governments were surveying their vendors, what types of questions were they asking to get feedback from the vendor community? That was the second bucket. The third was procurement intake forms. So essentially, especially for governments that had central procurement offices, how were they communicating to user departments to share what their specific solicitation need was? So was there a formalized process where a user department would explain what they were looking to buy, what their timeline was, how did central procurement structure that initial touch point with user departments? And then lastly, we asked for vendor performance evaluation form. So especially for governments that didn't necessarily have digital systems to really track vendor performance on an ongoing basis. What were some of the forms they were using to allow user departments to give feedback on an ongoing basis on how vendors were performing, especially on their highest priority contracts. So we did this open call to our membership and ultimately 30 different governments submitted resources that they were really excited about across those four categories. And we're now featuring 14 different government resources in those categories in this library. and we're hoping to launch new categories in this library in the coming year.

SPEAKER_00: 27:25

That's excellent. So you mentioned NIGP, and I assume that you have, and you mentioned MPI, and I assume you guys have some relationship of some form with NASPO. So how do you guys kind of fit into all of that ecosystem? I assume you seek to have partnerships with those folks, or tell me about kind of how you guys fit into this overarching universe of help options that people have.

SPEAKER_01: 27:49

Yeah, so I think the biggest thing is we're just always in constant communication with them. I think all these organizations, including us, including you, all share this value of really trying to elevate the status of procurement and to try to share best practice tools and really help the profession continue to grow, both in its importance, but also in serving folks who work in the field. So we are slightly limited because we're an academic institution that we have to be slightly careful about formal partnerships, but We always work with groups like an IGP and NASPO and NPI to hear where there are opportunities for us to speak at their events or to share resources or to share what we're hearing from our members, what they're hearing to really make sure that our content is resonating and making sure that we're all aligned and trying to spread these messages as much as possible.

SPEAKER_00: 28:37

Yeah. And, you know, Civic, of course, we do client work. We do projects where people want to have a a lot of wood behind the arrow, I guess, so to speak, right? They need some operational things like actually completed. They need to drive something full and comprehensive, but we do lots of things that are free, like this kind of stuff, the content, and we'll do lots of general advisory kind of things. So, I mean, I think that people need to get help where help is available. And I'm glad that you guys have stood up this kind of function and put this energy into it. And I think that it's a great function.

SPEAKER_01: 29:10

I appreciate that, Dustin. And I will say, our whole team reads your LinkedIn posts on Fridays. We always find the content that you're creating and curating really helpful.

SPEAKER_00: 29:18

Is there some innovation that you guys are working on or something that's next up that you haven't had a chance to talk about yet? Or where are you guys going over the next few years?

SPEAKER_01: 29:28

Yeah, so the two things that I'll plug, which we're pretty excited about. So the first, and I know, Dustin, your team as well has looked into this and even partnered with some other organizations. We're really trying to think about creative ways to leverage our membership to do some more benchmarking and to really use data around what our member community is seeing in the procurement field. So I mentioned those member surveys before, and a lot of that right now is more as a feedback tool for us to know how to improve the network. But we are starting to think about investing more research capacity to actually use those surveys to start to benchmark what is happening in the procurement space across the country. So really thinking about categories like across our network, what are average procurement cycle times, or what is the typical spending threshold, or what are staffing ratios between central procurement departments and the amount that they spend? Is there a way for us to collect a lot of that data from our members and then share it back and really have folks see how they stack up on these different averages and benchmarks that we're collecting? So would first off just welcome you or the audience connecting directly with us about any other ideas of categories or existing research that you already have in this space. So that's the first, I'll pause there and see any reactions and then I'll share the other.

SPEAKER_00: 30:43

We're actually also very interested in that, and we're a couple of steps towards it. We actually have a partner, which is the Hackett Group, and we've gone through a pretty thorough exercise of walking against what Civic regards as guiding principles that would be applicable to most procurement shops and then establishing performance measures that would associate with those guiding principles. Thank you. the data point, but I think it is a data point. And so we have intended to launch a public sector cohort activity around that. It's just life gets busy and you get kind of swirled in circles. But I'd love to compare notes with you on kind of what we're thinking with that, because part of it was as you said, trying to build the basis for that capture. And there might be, maybe there's some ways that we could collaborate on that.

SPEAKER_01: 31:50

Yeah, definitely. And there's so many times that we have members come to us and say, I'm getting all this pressure from different stakeholders in my government who say, the government's taking too long. Our cycle times are a year or two years. And they often come to us and say, do you have data? Is there information that we can share to let stakeholders know this is incremental progress we want to make towards streamlining some of these processes? But public procurement is fundamentally different than the private sector. And there are going to be certain things that folks have to reset their expectations. So on categories like cycle times and others, I think we're really excited to figure out, are there benchmarks that we can share with folks that might not be the ideal benchmarks? I think we're all excited to make more progress, but just to have folks understand that starting point.

SPEAKER_00: 32:34

Well, and a lot of it also is what is the sourcing event and who is doing it within the sourcing event? Because public sector NC's have a broad spectrum of who's actually doing the work. So the number one thing that you hear a lot, of course, is RFPs are slow and procurement events are slow. It's hard to then compare that in a situation where a center procurement shop is being involved in helping develop the sourcing strategy Or if the department is supposed to do the sourcing strategy and then procurement is reviewing it and then there's loops because we haven't done enough training or etc. So even comparing across public sector entities on the amount of cycle time on RFPs is embedded in an understanding of what is the governance process that has been established and. Is it set up for success? Have we created the pipes in the organization to actually emphasize throughput or have we created the pipes in a way that it requires a lot of non-professionalized production of certain parts of it that end up with a lot of thrashing loops? So, I mean, coming back to the first part of our conversation, you know, really from a a governance perspective and a guiding principle perspective, how do we say what we want procurement to do and how do we want it to act and be judged? And then therefore, can we assess our processes and our templates and our policy guidance against that criteria? Because if we don't have that kind of mentality, then it's very easy to have a mishmash of policies and templates and processes that end up then making it very hard to compare one procurement shop to another. So that's all great points. So looking forward a month, I see you're on the NIGP list. I'm on one and a half sessions. So maybe why don't you talk about what you're going to talk about NIGP forum here in almost a month from today, August 20 something ish. So

SPEAKER_01: 34:35

yeah, we're excited. I'll be there with one other colleague, Isabel Garcia. So yeah, we have a session today. I believe it's on Tuesday of the, and I should be convening, where we're actually, it's very related to process efficiency since we were just talking about that, where you run an interactive simulation that we're trying to adapt right now. So it's relevant for both a virtual audience who may be joining from home, as well as those that are in person, where folks basically come into the room and play a fictional role where they are a chief procurement officer of this state city called Citylandia. And they're basically getting presented with different information around the bottlenecks that are showing up in their procurement process and what challenges they're facing around efficiency. So the whole simulation and training is really to help folks working in procurement get into the practice of using data and thinking about what types of data can reveal underlying stories or challenges that they're facing around their procurement processes and then what interventions may be possible, including some of the things that you talked about, what additional trainings or better communication between user departments and central procurement or even bigger things like readjusting staffing allocation or ratios that may be impacting some of their process efficiency challenges. So it's a simulation we've run a few times, but we're making some adaptations to make it relevant for a hybrid audience.

SPEAKER_00: 35:51

That's great. Well, it sounds very interesting. Well, I'm doing the session that we did last year on using LinkedIn and being effective at building a network and how that helps procurement professionals to grow and to have more opportunities for mentoring interactions. And we'll be reprising that panel again, doing that with Jennifer Cilentic and Steven Nelson and John Flynn and Alina Croy. So I'll be doing that session. And then we're also sponsoring one of the workshop sessions. I think it's still working out which one is the best fit, but we'll be involved in announcing that and generally supporting the procurement community through that kind of work. And we'll also be there as a whole company for a company meeting before that. So we'll have a lot of the civic people around. So we're excited about Forum soon.

SPEAKER_01: 36:47

Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 36:47

it's really exciting. And I haven't been to Charlotte

SPEAKER_01: 36:49

in a while also, so I'm excited to get back down to North Carolina.

SPEAKER_00: 36:53

What do you want people to take away from this conversation? Maybe they haven't used this resource before or they didn't even know it was available. So how would somebody who wanted to say, well, I at least want to learn about it, like what would be their actions?

SPEAKER_01: 37:07

Yeah, so I'll say, and maybe Dustin, we can follow up with this too, even when you post the LinkedIn live on LinkedIn. So again, for folks who work directly in the public sector for governments or government affiliated entities, they're welcome to join our network. It's completely free. They can choose to engage however is most useful for them. And there's a really easy signup process. It takes about two minutes where you just use your government email. You let us know a bit about your background and then you're able to become a member. And then our team will follow up with, opportunities about how to engage, including a group welcome call that we typically do twice a month. So that's really for folks who work directly in government. But I would also say I know that there's probably some folks in the call that don't necessarily have government email addresses. Even though you're not able to become an official PEN member, we still encourage folks to check out the public aspects of our platform. So Like I mentioned before, our resource library is completely available to the public. It has 70 different publications, tools, templates that all really come from our different direct project work and insights that we've gained from governments around the country and even the world. So folks are free to access that. And then as well, our virtual events that we host once a month are primarily folks who are members who are coming, but they're also open to the public and folks can certainly even download past events presentation materials and recordings directly from the website as well.

SPEAKER_00: 38:28

That's great. Well, we appreciate you jumping on and also appreciate getting to make this happen on kind of an agile request. It was a good timing for me to have LinkedIn Live. And so you guys were an obvious choice. So I'm glad to be able to play some small part in further letting people know about this service and that they can do there. And I'll convert this to a podcast as well. And so we'll help keep getting the word out. I appreciate it, Colin. And I look forward to seeing you in Charlotte.

SPEAKER_01: 38:59

That was great, Dustin. Thanks again for the invitation. I'll see you in a few weeks.