Tag: Commercials

  • Cost vs. Quality

    Cost vs. Quality

    A debate as old as time, and a loop that goes around and around; or so it seems in the Public Sector commercial space. Every few years, often every couple of spend control cycles, the debate of cost vs. quality rears its head again; with Commercial weighting flip flopping between Quality as the most important…

  • Partnership

    The good and the bad. At Difrent we always talk about our desire to deliver in partnership with out clients. To move beyond the pure supplier and client relationship to enable proper collaboration. One of my main frustrations when I was ‘client side’ was the amount of suppliers we’d work with who said they would…

  • Agile Delivery in a Waterfall procurement world

    One of the things that has really become apparent when moving ‘supplier side’ is how much the procurement processes used by the public sector to tender work doesn’t facilitate agile delivery. The process of bidding for work, certainly as an SME is an industry in itself. This month alone we’ve seen multiple Invitations to Tender’s…

  • Do Civil Servants dream of woolly sheep?

    The frustration of job descriptions and their lack of clarity. One of the biggest and most regularly occurring complaints about the Civil Service (and public sector as a whole) is their miss-management of commercial contracts. There are regularly headlines in the papers accusing Government Departments & the Civil Servants working in them of wasting public…

  • The art of Transferring Knowledge

    One of the most common questions that comes up in Bid opportunities is usually some variant of “how do you transfer your knowledge to us before you leave?” This is completely valid question, and really important to both ask, and to understand, but also hard to answer well in 100 words without risking looking like…

  • Thoughts from the other side

    No, don’t worry, I’ve not passed on and started speaking from beyond the grave; but given I’m now 3 months into my role at Difrent I thought it might be worth reflecting on how I’ve found things on the other side of the commercial table so to speak. In the first 3 months I’ve worked…