One of the most important project development tasks is the appointment of the professional team who will be responsible for advising and supporting you in delivering your project.
The quality of the advice you receive - and to a great extent the successful delivery of your project will depend on the quality of the team you appoint and the brief to which they will be working.
Whether your advisors are to be appointed formally or informally, our brief preparation and tender service will provide you with all the support that you need. You may tender formally to comply with regulations, or simply want to find out what the market has to offer, either way the success of your choice of supplier, consultant or contractor rests largely on the quality of the initial brief.
As project development experts, the De Facto team can help you with what to look for, ask for and who you should be asking to help you deliver your project. We have done this for clients at various stages of their projects – from selecting a consultant to carry out a feasibility study, to tendering a design contract, to assisting with the procurement of a building contract.
Click below to see some examples of our work in this area, or click here for a pdf with more details:
East Devon District Council wished to tender a contract to appoint a Lead Consultant to progress the development of two capital projects in Exmouth and Seaton. EDDC appointed De Facto to write a detailed and comprehensive brief to be used in their tendering process.
To this end, we developed a robust and authoritative tender brief which met with all the requirements of Council/OJEU procedures and required prospective candidates to demonstrate how they would address each element of the project development process.
This assignment was carried out to a very tight deadline and provided the project team at East Devon with a valuable and reliable resource and outcome in support of their work on these important schemes.
In addition to visioning, objective setting, feasiblity study and business planning work which resulted in development funding from the HLF, we prepared a number of briefs for specialist contractors for the Royal West of England Academy.
These included the development of a brief for architects in relation to the proposed £12m redevelopment plan as well as briefs for project planning and audience development services.
In both cases we prepared documents which included project background, scope of work, specific requirements of the brief, expected outputs, budget, timescale and tender arrangements.
The contract to undertake the project management and funding of the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth was amongst the first undertaken by De Facto. Prior to this, De Facto's Managing Director, Ingrid Heseltine, whilst at Cornwall County Council, had been responsible on the client side for the development and management of the project.
This included the management of the OJEU tender process which resulted in the commissioning of Long & Kentish Architects to design a landmark series of buildings for the project.
Work included the development of the outline brief and appraisal criteria, appraisal of 70 applicant submissions, chairing of decision-making panel and final appointment of the design team.
De Facto was asked to implement the tender process to appoint a consultant to carry out an Economic Impact Assessment which would determine the impact of the CUC on Cornwall's economy.
Our own work on assessing the potential impact of the CUC had been used to support the region's bid for financial support from Government and this had opened the way for a full economist-based assessment of impact against which the success of the CUC would subsequently be measured.
Our work on this assignment included preparation of the project brief in consultation with project partners and the distribution of tender documents to a long list of potential candidates as well as dealing with responses to queries from candidates and co-ordination of the evaluation process.