successfully navigating contracts

What are the secrets of winning government contracts, asks John Mitchell?

The following article featuring Helen Zimmerman, Navitas English Executive General Manager, recently appeared in Campus Review.

ACPET thanks Dr John Mitchell and Campus Review for permitting ACPET to publish the article in its entirity.

Shock waves hit competitors in New South Wales recently when ACL, a wholly owned subsidiary of share market giant Navitas, won six contracts across the state to deliver the Federal Government’s Language, Literacy and Numeracy Program (LLNP). Competitors would love to know ACL’s roadmap for success.

ACL will be the lead agency for the delivery of LLNP services in four Sydney regions and two country regions. The four Sydney regions are Canterbury-Bankstown, Central West, Fairfield-Liverpool and the Inner West. ACL will work in consortium with one of Australia’s largest community organisations Mission Australia to deliver the LLNP in these Sydney regions.

ACL also will work with Riverina community college in Wagga Wagga and Western College in Dubbo to deliver the program in Griffith, Leeton and Deniliquin. In total, the contracts are worth $24m over the next three years.

The language, literacy and numeracy program is a program of the Department of Education, Employment, Workplace Relations and provides up to 800 hours of free accredited training for jobseekers to obtain basic skills for employment. “It’s targeted at disadvantaged job-seeker groups such as indigenous Australians, young people with disabilities, migrants, refugees and those in regional and rural communities as well,” said Navitas English Executive General Manager Helen Zimmerman.

According to Zimmerman, securing this hotly contested contract was the result of diligence not good fortune. She believes ACL won the contract by drawing on its specialist experiences and long-standing partnerships by undertaking thorough preparation and being willingness to listen to the client.

“Our core business is teaching English language. That’s what we specialise in and we have done so since 1987 . Back in the 1990’s we were delivering labour market training programs in the west and south-west of Sydney to about 5,000 clients from non-English speaking backgrounds and people with literacy and numeracy problems. In fact, in our first partnership with Mission Australia in 1995 we were running English for welders and forklift drivers.”

The tender response document was an opportunity to highlight ACL’s core strengths, said Zimmerman. “One of our strengths is that we actually deliver outcomes and we have a very strong track record of exceeding the KPIs that are in our contracts.

“Another core strength of ours is we work in genuine partnerships with our clients, both government and individuals, with industry, with local communities. And we also have highly skilled, qualified, experienced workforce, so that really assists too.”

ACL left nothing to chance in preparing its tender response. It put in place an expert tender preparation team in 2009 to respond not only to the LLNP tender but also to a number of other critical tenders. “All of our commonwealth government programs were re-tendered this year, so we’ve had a substantial tender team working for over nine months.”

A key member of the tender team was Barbara Barnard, who heads up the Employment Pathways unit. The Adult Migrant English Program, in which she is a senior manager , has delivered programs to over 110,000 people.

“It was obvious in this tender that they really wanted the training to be contextualised to industry. The Adult Migrant English Program has looked in the last number of years at facilitating access to employment for migrants and refugees, so Barbara has been working very closely with industry. We were able to bring in that experience in too.”

Barnard is also managing the start up of the new services, “putting in place the planning, making sure that we’ve got the curricula, the materials, resources, training the teachers, recruiting new staff.”

“DEEWR didn’t give much notice this time. We had just over a month to get ready . To hit the ground running we needed experience and the systems and scale. DEEWR’s expectation is that we will meet their key performance indicators from the start.”

Differences to lives

Profit is not the driving motivation for ACL, said Zimmerman. “We do this not because we want to grow bigger but we do it because we know we deliver results that make differences to people’s lives. And so we were really determined we would be successful in the LLNP.

“We’re very focused on ensuring that Australia gets the best out of its migrants and refugees in terms of settlement, that they have lives that are fulfilling and that they’re able to contribute back to Australia.”

“From a business point of view yes, it continues to allow Navitas to grow, however we only do that through being able to deliver on what’s asked of us. And as long as we continue to deliver the best quality outcomes we’ll continue to win contracts.”

Given ACL’s sharing of its pathway to success, to stay in business its competitors face a challenging journey ahead.

Contact helenz [at] acl [dot] edu [dot] au (Helen Zimmerman)
 

Dr John Mitchell is a VET analyst. See www.jma.com.au