What you need to know
Weighting and costing
Weighting
As you write your brief, you need to consider the importance of different aspects of it and whether some parts will carry more weight than others.
You should discuss weighting and decide how you will score the bids before you issue your consultant’s brief. The process should always be seen to be transparent so deciding how you will score bids before any contact with consultants is good practice.
If you are using weighting when assessing your bids you should include this in the tender brief. For example: Submissions will be evaluated on a qualification/quality/price basis (35:35:30) and will include the following:
(i) Understanding of the brief;
(ii) Skills and experience of the team;
(iii) Methodology and approach;
(iv) Price
Costing
If you are applying for funding, you will have to have projected consultant’s costs. As part of this process, you might want to speak to some other groups who have contracted consultants to find out the costs that they were quoted.
Many consultants charge a daily rate for work. It can be useful to know what the daily rate you should expect to be charged is, and this is where talking to other organisations who have employed consultants can help. As you look at the work involved and how many full days and half days you expect will be needed to do the job well, you will start to build up a picture of the budget that will be needed.
While it can be useful to know the overall cost other organisations have paid, you will need to think about your own customised process and what you need. Some questions you might want to consider include:
How many days will you allocate the consultant for initial prep and familiarisation, community consultation, analysing the consultation, drafting up the plan, etc. If you are going to have an action plan element to it, then you should include some time for stakeholder/partner engagement to populate the actions.
Will you pay travel and/or accommodation costs? (this may vary depending on where your community is located)
Will there be other costs involved e.g. room hire, printing - will your organisations pay these directly and if so, make sure you remove these from the overall budget available to the consultant (but let them know the budget for these).
If you have secured funding and there is a fixed budget, it can be useful to include the budget within the brief. This allows consultants to outline what they can provide within the available budget and avoids bids coming in that are out of your price range. Generally, where a budget is given, consultants, will tell you what they can deliver within your budget.
On the other hand, if your organisation has funding of its own that it can use, there is the option of not stating a budget. The bids will be based on what work the consultant thinks needs to be done to deliver what you want. Prices can vary significantly between consultants depending how much time they are proposing to spend on the work.
Downloads
A guide for Local Place Plans