My goal is to help lift the standard of procurement and encourage people to pursue it as a profession, rather than something they just fall into. With that in mind, many do just fall into procurement and kind of just "wing it". Sure they get there in the end, but often engaging in questionable practices and finding out they have bound their organisation to a contractual obligation which may not provide value, or even solve the initial problem.

This program will start by uncovering the basic elements of procurement, this will be looking at the key components and allowing us to define procurement and understand its impact to the business environment.

We will then explore the core aspects which impact on procurement including contracts and other associated legislation. Once we have completed this quick dive we will jump into some practical stuff looking at the commencement of the procurement life cycle; the discovery stage.

This what I've called Part 2 and this is where the course gets practical. To get the most out of this section it's recommended that you have an active procurement or something you can apply the learning to; after all the real learning happens when you apply it.

In my experience I find that most of the issues faced in procurement can be traced back to the Discovery and Planning stages. That is where we identify our needs and when we make a plan to meet them. In this course we are going to focus on the discovery stage, there will be a follow on course which will look at procurement planning so if you end up getting value here you will be able to continue the application of your learning.

In Part 2 we will explore and hopefully you will follow along and apply things starting with gathering all required inputs such as legislation, policy and understanding governance requirements, I find that many times these are not proactively uncovered and become roadblocks later in the process.

Once you've understood the requirements we will then work on uncovering the internal and business needs; considering and defining the problem, working with stakeholders to frame their needs as well as discussing the importance of lessons learned and starting with insights from the past.

Finally we will take a look into the supply side talking about things including market research and market sounding.

Before closing out into what should pave the way for you to develop either a great business case or procurement plan.