The SPRITE Programme of the European Commission focuses on the application, validation and demonstration of methodologies and tools that support and guide European organisations in the procurement of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems and services. Emphasis is placed on conformance to open specifications and in the promotion and awareness of best practice.

The SPRITE Programme originally funded the development of the European Handbook on Open Systems (EPHOS) and EuroMethod as tools to assist public procurement organisations. The new SPRITE initiative has been expanded to include support for commercial procurement and emphasis has been placed on new methods and approaches that support incremental improvement in ICT procurement practice for both public and commercial organisations.

For 1998 there are three major projects on procurement best practice, VALIDATE, ASSIST and PULSE, which includes the TEAM project. Some 24 user organisations are taking part, including members of The Open Group’s European Procurement Forum. The projects will provide a wealth of useable information and the first results will be presented before the end of 1988.

The VALIDATE project is focused at quantifying the impact that specific procurement practices have on IT implementations and the organisations that develop and support them. The project will:

• Provide a guidebook of best procurement practices based on distilling the latest methods, guides, tools and approaches to IT procurement from around the world.
• Quantify the relationships between specific procurement practices and IT project success. This will be done through studies of a number of actual IT procurements by both public and commercial organisations across Europe using common benchmarks.
• Assist IT users to identify specific procurement actions that have been shown to improve common IT implementation and organisational issues in other European organisations.
• Deliver a set of case studies that document best of breed procurement programmes as well as quantify the improvements achieved through specific procurement practices (e.g. referencing open standards).

The ASSIST project will create a training curriculum and diagnostic tool based on the latest methods and approaches for ICT procurement. The project will:

• Develop a two-day training course that teaches best practice for ICT procurement as well as approaches for users to undertake and manage improvements in internal procurement programmes and policies.
• Develop a PC based self-diagnostic tool that users will use to determine the extent to which they are implementing recognised best procurement practices. Management and staff can use the tool to measure progress towards specific procurement improvement goals and to identify areas within the organisation where procurement policy is inconsistent or not fully implemented.
• Conduct a series of workshops across Europe to train organisations on procurement practices and approaches and to assist in formulating specific improvement actions for their own procurement policies and programmes.
• Undertake a set of promotional activities to make European users aware of actions that can be taken to improve ICT procurement and encourage the use of the self-diagnostic tool as a catalyst for organisations to assess their own policies and take action for improvement.

The TEAM project seeks to identify new ways to improve the teamwork, leadership and management of ICT procurement teams. Through a series of organisational experiments with major European users the project will:

• Identify organisational techniques that strengthen leadership of procurement teams.
• Evaluate new communication and project management tools to determine the impact they have in improving procurement team performance.
• Explore new approaches to creating more cohesive teams that work more co-operatively
• Identify team management approaches for addressing complex problems and for making better-informed supplier/technology decisions.
• Quantify the perceived improvements of each team building experiment based on organisational surveys and data collection.
• Provide a set of case studies showing team building approaches that were shown to have yield the greatest benefits for managing procurement teams and delivering successful IT projects.

The PULSE Project aims to combine two approaches for assisting organisations to improve their procurement processes:

• Defining and verifying a formal methodology for identifying and assessing the processes used by an organisation for ICT procurement.
• Identifying a set of organisational actions that improve the way in which procurements are managed and the success of ICT procurement teams, through the TEAM project.

The main deliverables are

• A formal model for describing the process of ICT procurement that is generalised and applicable across a wide range of ICT applications and industries.
• A formal methodology for assessing procurement processes that will allow organisations to measure the sophistication of their own procurement processes and identify areas for improvement – benchmarking against the best practices established through VALIDATE
• A set of PC based tools and guides to assist users in conducting formal assessments of their procurement processes and to compare their results with national or industry averages and best of breed.

Each of the above projects starts January 1998 and is scheduled for completion by the end of the year.

For more information please contact:  g.bird@opengroup.org