Stimulus Learning Session: Using Procurement to Achieve Better Outcomes for Residents

This Learning Series Recap summarizes lessons from the GPL’s Stimulus Learning Series session on Using Procurement to Advance Innovation, a deep-dive on how funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) can be used to procure for services that improve outcomes for residents. 

Using ARPA funds to procure for innovative, results-driven services  

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provides a unique opportunity to address the systemic inequities laid bare by the pandemic and reshape the public systems that support vulnerable families. Successful execution of this transformation work will require the combined efforts of government employees with goods and services acquired from the private sector. This is true of sheltering the homeless, providing job training to the unemployed, and building and maintaining new technology solutions. Agency leaders can, therefore, leverage procurement to amplify ARPA system transformation efforts — making procurement processes more efficient, inviting, and transparent; using procurements to advance departmental and jurisdiction-wide goals; and laying the foundation for measuring progress and driving continual improvement. Yet too often, procurement and contract management is treated as a back-office function rather than a strategic activity, causing governments to encounter common procurement challenges: 

• Requests for proposals (RFPs) lack a description of the jurisdiction’s overarching goals, leading to vendor responses that don’t align with what the jurisdiction actually needs.
• Teams rush through writing an RFP to get it out the door quickly, causing delayed releases or re-issued RFPs because of errors or misinformation.
• Limited information gathering or market research occurs or the RFP is simply recycled from the last time it was issued, resulting in RFPs that lack emerging best practices and/or vendor and client perspectives.
• RFPs’ scopes of work are overly prescriptive or include onerous requirements, yielding few quality proposals or causing responding vendors to feel limited in their ability to offer innovative solutions. 

Leaders from state and local government agencies across the country are planning to tackle these challenges using results-driven contracting strategies designed to help entities use procurement and contracting to achieve better outcomes for residents. When crafting a results-driven RFP, there are several key questions to address, including why the service is needed, which outcomes the contract should achieve, and how to measure success.

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