Plantinga, H; Voordijk, H and Dorée, A (2020) Creating strategic alignment during the development of procurement instruments. Proceedings of Institution of Civil Engineers: Management, Procurement and Law, 174(1), pp. 14-22. ISSN 17514304
Abstract
It is generally acknowledged that creating strategic alignment is key to achieving good procurement performance. However, when it comes to aligning procurement instruments with an organisation's strategic goals, the literature is unclear about exactly how such alignment can be created in practice. Focusing on the process of procurement instrument development by public clients in the construction industry, this research explores how alignment with strategic goals can be created. Since procurement instrument development is portrayed in the literature as a highly intuitive and subjective process, this research examined how public clients can rationally and objectively create strategic alignment during this development process. This paper presents an action research case study on the development of a new procurement instrument. By interpreting strategic alignment as coherence in reasoning between procurement instrument design and multiple levels of strategy, it explains how several research interventions eventually resulted in creating alignment in practice. The results indicate that the rational and objective creation of strategic alignment requires that the reasoning behind procurement instrument design be made explicit and linked to the reasoning behind higher-level strategies. Since this can easily become complex, practitioners should master practical tools such as causal mapping to manage the complexity effectively.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | contracting; management; procurement |
| Index terms: | case study, causal mapping, public client, construction industry, action research, reasoning, strategy, practitioner, coherence, complexity |
| Subjects: | sociology, systems engineering, industry analysis, management, data collection methods, cognitive psychology, practitioner, human factors and perception |
| Topics: | Roles and Professions, Stakeholder Management, Business Strategy, Research Practice, Engineering Principles |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTE |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here