Tendering and Procurement Practices Training

A tender is where most of a contract's problems are created: a specification written around one supplier's product, criteria weighted after the bids arrive, an evaluation nobody recorded, and an award that cannot be explained to an unsuccessful bidder or to an auditor. The commercial damage usually arrives later, when the contract turns out to have bought something nobody needed at a price nobody can compare. This week runs the process in order, from specification to award and handover, with the documentation each stage has to leave behind.

It runs 7 times over the published calendar, in 6 cities and live online. Every date is the same programme with the same content and the same certificate.

• Write a specification in terms of requirement and outcome rather than of a product.
• Set and weight evaluation criteria before bids are opened, and record them.
• Run an evaluation an unsuccessful bidder and an auditor could both follow.
• Handle a clarification, a deviation and a late bid without compromising the process.
• Hand the awarded contract over so it can be managed against what was bid.

Procurement officers and buyers running competitive processes, technical staff who write specifications, evaluation panel members, and internal auditors reviewing awards.

Short input, then work. Across 5 days of roughly 6 teaching hours each, the balance sits deliberately with the second: a programme where the trainer talks for six hours produces notes rather than capability.

• Your own material

  Exercises run on situations delegates bring, not on a case study written for a different organisation in a different decade.

• A capped cohort

  Small enough that everybody is asked something. Executive programmes are capped tighter still.

• Practice under scrutiny

  The difficult conversation, the challenged assumption, the decision defended out loud. Judgement is not built by watching.

• Something to take back

  Each day ends with a thing you can use on Monday rather than a slide deck you will not reopen.

• A specification rewritten in outcome terms for one of the delegate's own requirements.
• An evaluation matrix with weightings and scoring guidance set in advance.
• An award recommendation and handover pack in audit ready form.

A GATI certificate recording what you attended, issued after the programme has run and attendance has been taken. Attending at least 80 per cent of the days earns a certificate of completion; attending less earns a certificate of attendance stating exactly what was attended.

Every certificate carries a code that anybody can check against GATI's own record, which is what makes it worth holding. It records participation. This site will not imply one it does not have.