Cyd stands out due to its innovative approach in several ways. In just one year Cyd has established itself as a community-led foundation to support behavioural and cultural change across whole organisations. This is crucial as various reforms are taking place that affect the way public procurement is undertaken by Welsh public bodies. Cyd emphasises a hybrid model that integrates human expertise with digital infrastructure, ensuring both efficient information access and personalised support that’s tailored to meeting the needs of the commercial and procurement community across the public sector in Wales.

Unlike previous efforts, Cyd aims to avoid becoming another policy document repository or a static website, focusing instead on being a dynamic, current, and intuitive resource. It seeks to address the fragmented nature of procurement knowledge and resources across Wales, providing a centralised signposting to expertise and fostering a community-led approach.

The Cyd project is currently in an extended alpha phase running from April 2023 to March 2024. This focuses on further developing and testing the services that Cyd offer, and creating a roadmap for delivery based on community priorities and needs. It involves continuous collaboration with the community to ensure that services developed meet user needs and contribute positively to the procurement landscape in Wales.

Plans to categorise content based on procurement value have shifted to a more flexible structure, using navigation and filtering options. This aims to provide tailored advice depending on value, risk and complexity. Cyd is also prioritising support for navigating legislative changes like the Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023 and the Procurement Act 2023. Additionally, Cyd is developing services related to governance, performance measurement, learning resources, integration with other initiatives, and user engagement.

Cyd is being delivered by 2 private sector organisations - one are experts in public procurement and the full commercial lifecycle, the other are experts in user-centred service design and agile delivery - in collaboration with the Welsh Government and the wider commercial and procurement community across Wales. This includes the Welsh Local Government Association, police, fire and ambulance services, universities, housing associations, and other public sector organisations.

In the current phase of Cyd, the primary users and beneficiaries are the commercial and procurement community across Wales. A number of other public sector and social sector organisations that are interested in the development of Cyd, include:

The Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales
The Waste and Resources Action Programme for Wales (WRAP Cymru)
The Centre of Public Value Procurement at Cardiff University
The Value-Based Health and Care Academy at Swansea University

In August 2023 the Welsh Local Government Association made the bold decision to remove procurement content from their new website, and instead signpost their members to Cyd.

WLGA represents 22 local authorities, 3 fire and rescue authorities and 3 national park authorities, to help improve public services and promote local democracy in Wales.

WLGA is helping their members realise the “art of the possible” in public procurement, and collaboration, sharing and reuse is at the heart of this.

“If others have a better digital proposition for us, we don’t need to compete with them, we need to recognise the potential and help them achieve it.” (Richard Dooner, WLGA’s lead officer for procurement and advocate for a new Welsh way for procurement)

Cyd’s success depends on being different from other services that had been tried before, such as the former National Procurement Service, being accessible to all stakeholders, and enabling capacity creation rather than draining resources. There was some scepticism expressed on whether Cyd was going to be successful.

The approach taken with the development of Cyd would mitigate this risk by starting small, with a minimum viable product, and focusing on developing potential solutions to meeting the needs of the community, through taking a user-centred design approach.

Experimentation is and continues to be central to Cyd. Taking this approach welcomes “failure” as a product of trying new things, to find out what works and what doesn’t.

We’ve tested our riskiest assumptions, by:
evidencing how we’ve tested them
demonstrating how they’ve been considered in Cyd’s development

We’ve understood the community’s needs and how they can be met, by:
engaging stakeholders
documenting their needs
defining potential solutions
measuring the impact on the policy area

We’ve developed, tested and iterated priority service areas, by:
developing prototypes
testing them with users
iterating them based on feedback

We’ve defined user journeys by understanding:
how people will access Cyd services and their journey in using them
each element of the service e.g. online or offline
the service landscape

We’ve worked in the open and have measured how we’ve engaged and the impact we’ve had.

The user-centred design and agile methodology used by Cyd is a scalable approach that
can be used more broadly for other procurement policy areas. This methodology can be applied more broadly to other priority Welsh procurement policy areas (e.g. transparency, social value, etc), and refined through iterative and incremental delivery.

As more Welsh procurement policy areas are prioritised, the number of stakeholders and discussion groups will naturally increase, which should be reflected by the Cyd community.

Engagement with the commercial and procurement community so far has highlighted other practitioner functions (e.g. finance, audit, digital data and technology, etc) who are also focusing on net zero.

In 2024 we’ll see the public sector organisations across the UK double down on preparations for the Procurement Act 2023 coming into force, currently anticipated for October 2024.

The areas expressed by the commercial and procurement community in Wales that are most important to them, and where they feel they need the most help, are on:

Regulatory change
Contract management
Capability and leadership
Policy implementation, particularly on net zero

Major changes are needed to the culture, processes, business models and use of technologies in public procurement, for it to be fit to deliver positive well-being impact for people and the planet, today and for generations to come.

The Cyd project has been running for just over a year (since October 2022). In November 2023 it was 'Highly Commended' at the Go Awards Wales 2023 ceremony within the 'Collaborative Procurement' category.

Properly exploring the intersection between digital government and public procurement, to deliver better well-being impacts and social value for people and planet, today and for future generations, is quite the exception, globally.

A small Welsh Government team sponsors Cyd and works relentlessly to create enabling environments for reform. The timing of Cyd could not be more fundamental.