You CAN Always Get What You Want

Many planners lack experience in procuring and selecting consultants, as well as managing projects since such opportunities can be rare. This session seeks to identify best practices in procurement and project management/delivery from both the public and private sector perspectives.

Many planners may only lead a procurement for consultants and manage projects involving consultants on behalf of their employers a handful of times in their careers. This often leaves them in a fog as to expectations, what they should seek in consultants, what they can ask, and even simple process. While they may turn to procurement professionals, in most cases their established processes for professional services do not contemplate the highly variable and creative world of planning policy. This often results in the inclusion of submission information that is unnecessary and may even conflict with other stated goals of the community, or worse... it results in consultant responses that do not provide the insight necessary to determine whether the firm is an effective match. This session will discuss the shared perspectives of a public sector planning director highly experienced in procurement and a private sector planner that has been on the receiving end of RFQs and RFPs hundreds of times.

But all this does is ensure that you get the restaurant menu that you like... just like in a restaurant, plenty can still go fabulously or wrong.

Shifting beyond the actual procurement, project management from either the consultant or the community (or both) can doom even the best match coming out of the selection process. From understanding the "ask" to the seemingly obvious communication, we will explore tips and tricks to help ensure the projects gets off and stays on the right foot.

The session will include several scenarios and is intended to have interactive elements (small groups that discuss what they would do in a scenario, etc.).