I emphasise the user guide is draft-only and yet to be considered by Infrastructure Australia’s board. Because of the general election here, Infrastructure Australia think that June this year is the earliest the user guide will be considered by their board. And so we have some time to invite comments and suggestions on the draft user guide and to incorporate changes/improvements into the final draft of the user guide to be considered by Infrastructure Australia’s board.
I’d welcome comments and suggestions you might wish to make direct to me by 31st May 2022.
As mentioned, the OECD have bought a licence from QUT for the procurement decision tool and re-branded it as STEPS and have adopted it as policy (the OECD’s launch of STEPS at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs8lucvC7DE and the corresponding report on the application of STEPS on two major roads in Norway can be found at: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/procurement-strategy-in-major-infrastructure-projects_38996343-en and attached).
The procurement decision tool and STEPS are substantially the same, though there is one difference concerning bundling that could be source of an appreciable difference in the procurement strategy rerecommended by the two tools on particular projects. In Section 6.1 of the draft Infrastructure Australia user guide for the procurement decision tool, a summary is given of the differences between the procurement decision tool and STEPS.
The procurement decision tool is illustrated in the user guide by a major road and a major hospital. We are also applying the tool to a school as part of my current Australian Research Council (ARC) research project: ARC Value in Operations (Activity 6 – see https://research.qut.edu.au/arcvio/studies/) and we’ll be launching the final report for this ARC project 23 June 2022. This final report also includes the results of the Value Rating Study and Tool on PPP and non-PPP schools.
The OECD are receiving strong interest on STEPS from several OECD countries such that the tool is now moving out of its infancy stage and ramping-up we hope to a new world standard in procurement decision-making theory and practice.
