Public/Private Partnerships (PPPs) can be so much more than the traditional infrastructure projects we typically associate with that term.
Now more than ever, strong partnerships between the Australian Public Service (APS) and the private sector are essential to enable the core capability and capacity to be uplifted across the public service – especially with the renewed focus from Government to bring work “back in-house” to the APS.
Strong public/private partnerships are built on more than just a discrete piece of work. They are built on:
To achieve these outcomes, APS officials conducting procurements need to be ‘informed purchasers’ – a concept that we saw come through strongly in the ANAO’s Report on Legal Services Arrangements in the APS, released in 2005 (Report). The Report refers to informed purchasers as a central point of coordination for the procurement and management of legal services. Informed purchasers understand the agency’s business, the context of the request for services, and their capacity to identify the most appropriate provider based on their knowledge of the relative strengths and weaknesses of service providers in the market (refer [3.4] of the Report).
With the Whole of Government Legal Services Panel established in 2019 having now completed the initial term, informed purchasers in each agency’s legal team should be very familiar with the panel firms and their offerings. However, as time moves on, so do personnel and potentially the legal capability across the legal teams both in-house in the APS and in private firms. This applies across all panel arrangements. Staying up-to-date with movements and awareness of the current relative strengths and weaknesses of providers, is a core element required by officials in being informed purchasers. This of course needs to be appropriately disclosed as relevant to procurement or other probity-related processes, however, it does not abrogate the need for informed purchasing and should not be seen as a “blocker” to being an informed purchaser.
Engaging providers with the right skill set and experience is imperative to achieving the outcomes of your project. It is this sharing of risk and responsibility for achieving the business outcomes, including knowledge transfer and setting up the BAU team for success after the end of the project, that is at the heart of strong public/private partnerships where each party has “skin in the game”.
My parents instilled in me the mantra “leave things better than you found them”. Of course, they were talking about cleaning up after myself! But I’ve found this applicable across many areas of my life, including the projects I’ve worked on in Synergy Law and more broadly across all my previous roles. I always look for opportunities to uplift processes, templates and in-house capability as part of my engagements.
Over the first year of Synergy Law, we have had the privilege to work with many different agencies on both legal and “quasi-legal” projects where our knowledge and experience as in-house APS lawyers has meant that we can provide an informed and practical perspective on the business activities of the agencies we are working with. We have provided clear, pragmatic and operationally focused recommendations for the agency to effect change after our engagement has ended and have uplifted internal APS capability in the meantime – a true public/private partnership!
