We’re on GCloud 14
There’s a new GCloud framework open from 9 November and FF Studio is on it. For those as clueless as I was 18 months ago, that basically means there’s now a legal vehicle for public sector bodies to give us some money to do some work.
We knew frameworks were important, but we’d not applied for one before. I quickly recognised that the move of Digital Marketplace from GDS to CCS in 2019 is still having repercussions in terms of information and service design, which is to say: the volume of information displayed across multiple websites and in varying formats when applying for GCloud was initially intimidating. Engaging with a non-internet-era process is frustrating for those born in the 1980s. Nonetheless, once through the information overload (thanks to Liz Whitefield, Sarah Gold and Clare Young for pointing us in the right directions), applying was a good forcing function for us to write down what we do and the services that we offer. We made an Arc Easel of the rate cards of some other relevant companies, to inform our own, and were happy to find that the actual application process remains consistent with the Design System.
After applying we learned that if you’ve not yet filed your first year’s accounts, CCS think you’re pretty sketchy. Our accountants helped us file our year 1 accounts within a week, and we were able to grapple with a poorly-designed spreadsheet to prove our Economic and Financial Standing.
One page of the 14 tab spreadsheet required to prove our economic standing
GCloud likes to think of itself as suitable for small businesses, but it’s not so friendly to new ones. How do you stay alive in the meantime? You hack procurement as best you can, day rates and contracting and subcontracting. In our first year we learned that it was true what someone had told us, “hacking procurement is the most creative thing you’ll do in the first two years”.
So after all of that, I’m really glad we got the siren to say we’re on GCloud - we’re open to business in the public sector. But I’m not sure this is the silver bullet given the way the wind is going in public sector procurement. DXW recently wrote their response to Jeni Tennison’s call out for ideas around DSIT, and top of the list was procurement. Because “commercial teams procure digital and tech skills as commodities”, and “only larger suppliers can compete on price like this”.
There are squeezes on budgets everywhere, and looking at all those rate cards made us realise that some organisations are designing their business models for lower unit costs rather than prioritising “expert, agile delivery”. Procurement is a tiring process for civil servants as much as it is for suppliers (I remember this keenly from bringing in some extra brains to work on identity and accounts in GOV.UK), so there’s a smidgen of rationale to putting out “four contracts worth around £19 million each” as one department did in 2023. That stretched-for-time head of product whose morale has been battered by Brexit, COVID and Jacob Rees-Mogg just wants people in the door to do the work and not to have to bother with procurement every six to nine to twelve months.
Those who win that work though are the “companies with deeper pockets [who] can gain incumbency with a public sector organisation by offering low prices before rates inevitably rise”. It’s the same suppliers who can afford to employ specialists in procurement into their organisations. Again, all well and good if that’s your game - but it’s not the ‘friendly to SMEs’ story that GCloud, or DOS (closed as a framework since 2022) try to tell.
Anyway - market share and winning large, long, high contract values isn’t really our game. We’re trying to bring together good, smart, experienced people who can develop thoughtful, well crafted outcomes. We know that’s not a scale game, either in company size or the work we take on. Most of our work so far has been with great, smart buyers who for whatever circumstance are able to invest in the methodical and diligent act of making change happen. Long may that continue, and now with less procurement faff than ever before (I hope).
AG