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The acquisition process will rarely continue to run on its own, without being driven. It is essential for customers for outsourced services that:

1. They are the ones who drive the process, rather than the service providers.
2. They continue to drive the process in the right direction.

Retaining control

In a competitive situation, service providers may attempt to drive the procurement to a greater or lesser extent. It is rare that a provider will attempt to take over the entire process (although I have known of occasions when providers have tried to do exactly that). More usual is for a service provider to attempt to monopolize the time and attention of the customer.

This monopolization can be done in several ways.

• The provider may suggest an "interactive" development of the solution. The advantages to you, the customer, is that, having worked together with the provider on developing the solution, it will more readily fit your requirements. In practice this means that the provider will schedule a series of meetings with some of your key staff. This will prevent them from getting too involved with other providers' solutions and will also keep this one provider's people and services constantly in the minds of those key staff.
• The provider may suggest a series of demonstrations or visits to their customers. These may involve visits to other cities (or, for some large projects, to other countries), thereby monopolizing your people's time even more. In fact, visits are more effective than meetings as far as the provider is concerned, as they create "dead time" in travelling which not only keeps your people away from other providers but also enables the provider to "socialize" with your staff.
• The provider may attempt an outright "capture" of the situation by putting a solution to you early in the process (and long before the due date for bids), and then spending the rest of the time refining it or justifying it. This can "embed" that solution in your mind as feasible before you have seen anything at all from any other competitive service provider.

Interactive development

The interactive development approach can actually be incorporated into your procurement policy. You might actually allow each service provider to develop their solution jointly with your own people. For this to happen effectively, you will need to:

1. have a small number of providers, usually no more than three and preferably only two if you can manage it
2. have separate teams of people who work with each provider, with these teams reporting to an overall co-ordinating team (although each team will probably only consist of two of your people)
3. use the co-ordinating team to develop evaluation criteria that will apply fairly to all the solutions.

You will also have to make arrangements to protect both your and the providers' intellectual property.

If you do not want to enter into an interactive development with all the providers, you should refuse to enter into one with any single provider. This should form part of your procurement policy and should be stated clearly to the providers at the beginning of the procurement process.

Demonstrations and visits

Demonstrations and visits can be useful if you have a set of evaluation criteria that you can apply to them. Often, the providers will begin to suggest visits early in the process, when you have not had time to develop such criteria. If you do not have a basis for judgement, you should not attend demonstrations or go on visits.

Your procurement policy should state how you will use demonstrations and visits. Some reasons for them are:

1. They prove that the provider really does have a product or service (unless you're seeing a prototype).
2. They prove that the provider has satisfied customers (particularly as the provider is hardly likely to arrange visits to dissatisfied customers).
3. They can be used to provide evidence to support or disprove views that you may have formed from reading the provider's bid (but you will have to plan carefully in order to do this and you will have to use demonstrations and visits constructively).

Early bids

There is no value for a provider in submitting its bid early if it cannot then continue to reinforce the messages in that bid. If you do not want this form of capture to occur, then your procurement policy should state that, once a bid has been submitted, no further correspondence or communication will be entertained until the bid deadline. You should state this to the providers and you should enforce it.

Retaining focus

The methods describing above can be used by providers to alter the focus of a procurement.

In an interactive development, the provider may widen the scope of the solution being developed to include additional services. These services will, of course, be ones offered by the provider.

With demonstrations and visits, the provider may point out additional benefits and savings that would result from additional services. Visits to existing customers of the provider are likely to point out the "integrated approach" taken by those customers.

An early proposal of services that meet your requirements can be augmented by additional proposals of services that will enable you to take an "integrated approach" to the "entire functionality". These additional proposals will attempt to persuade you of the additional benefits that you can obtain by using these additional services.

The counter to all of these approaches, if you have allowed them to occur, is to ask for prices on each of the services separately and prices on the "integrated approach". This should be done on condition that you have the right to accept any or all (or none) of the priced packages on offer.