A Memo from the Future

To: UK Public Sector Leadership Group

From: Regional Lead, Government & Infrastructure

Date: 1 July 2026 Re: BID/2026/0411 — Lessons Learned

Classification: Internal — Partner Group Only. Do not forward.

Colleagues,

A short note on last Friday's outcome, while it is still fresh. I am circulating this to the partner group rather than the wider practice because I would prefer the conversation stays in this room for now.

Background

We bid for a Phase 0 / Discovery engagement at a Whitehall department I will not name in writing. Scope was the standard shape: stakeholder analysis, requirements catalogue, target operating model outline, supporting business case, and a vendor longlist for the build phase. Our pricing was £680k over fourteen weeks. We were the incumbent on the adjacent programme and had every reasonable expectation of winning.

We did not win. We did not come second. The department issued a notice of no award and is taking the next phase to market with a delivery-only specification.

What Happened in the Room

The client commercial lead opened the clarification meeting by sharing a folder. In the folder were the following documents, which I am told were generated in-house over a long weekend by two civil servants and a contractor:

• A requirements catalogue with 142 BR/FR/NFR items, each traced to a named stakeholder and a programme objective.
• A draft SOBC at HM Treasury Green Book standard, with a long-list of options, a preferred option, and a five-case assessment that was, I will admit, broadly defensible.
• A vendor scorecard covering eleven suppliers against eighteen weighted criteria, drawing on G-Cloud listings and three years of public sector case studies.
• A target operating model and a Wardley map. The Wardley map was correctly drawn. I checked.
• A risk register with thirty-one entries and an ADR log explaining four prior decisions.

The commercial lead then asked, politely, what specifically we proposed to add to this body of work for £680k.

I will not record my colleague's answer here.

Where We Lost

Three observations, in descending order of comfort.

First, the client did not need our discovery work. They needed validation of work they had already done. Our proposal was scoped, priced, and staffed for a problem that no longer existed in the form we assumed.

Second, the work in the folder was not as good as ours would have been. It was good enough. "Good enough" turns out to be the relevant standard when the alternative is fourteen weeks and £680k. The marginal quality uplift we offered did not survive the price conversation.

Third, and this is the one I would ask the group to sit with: the documents in the folder were structurally identical to ours. Same headings. Same traceability chain. Same five-case structure. Same vendor scoring rubric. The civil servants had used an open-source toolkit that has been quietly accumulating users across government for the last six months. The toolkit ships with the templates we have been billing to populate.

What This Means for the Pipeline

I have asked the bid team to look back at the last twelve qualified opportunities in the public sector portfolio. Early reading, to be confirmed:

• Four of the twelve issued requirements documents that bear the structural fingerprint of the toolkit in question.
• Two of the twelve have asked, in pre-market engagement, whether we would be willing to bid on a "validation and assurance" basis rather than a full discovery.
• One has asked, directly, whether we would consider a fixed-price engagement priced against the time it would take a senior manager to read and challenge the existing pack.

I do not yet know whether this is the leading edge of a pattern or four data points that happen to rhyme. I would like the group's view by the end of the month.

Three Questions for the Partner Group

I am not bringing recommendations to this note. I am bringing questions, because I do not think the answer is obvious and I do not want to anchor the discussion prematurely.

1. On pricing. If discovery is now a validation exercise, the engagement shrinks from fourteen weeks to perhaps three. Do we hold the day rate and accept smaller engagements, or hold the engagement size and find new scope to fill it? The first preserves margin and shrinks the practice. The second preserves the practice and erodes margin. There is no third option I have been able to identify.
2. On the associate pyramid. The work that has been displaced is precisely the work the associate cohort does in years one and two. If that work is gone, the pyramid does not refill. We have a cohort starting in September. I would like a view on whether we are bringing them in to do something we can still bill for.
3. On the toolkit itself. Several firms are, I understand, exploring whether the maintainer can be quietly retained, the project forked into a "hardened enterprise edition", or the underlying repository acquired. I would caution the group against any of these options being pursued without legal review. The project is MIT-licensed and has 1,700 contributors-of-record. There is no acquisition that does not become public, and there is no public version of this acquisition that reads well.

What I Am Doing in the Meantime

For BID/2026/0411 specifically, I have asked the account team to request a debrief and to position us for the delivery phase, where our implementation capability remains genuinely differentiated. I would not characterise this as a recovery. I would characterise it as a managed retreat from the discovery end of the value chain, and I would like the group's permission to plan accordingly.

I am available on Tuesday afternoon if any of you would like to discuss before the leadership offsite. I would suggest, given the contents of this note, that the conversation happens on a walk rather than in a meeting room.

Regards,

[Name redacted] Regional Lead, Government & Infrastructure

This memo is for the Partner Group only. Please do not forward, summarise, or paraphrase its contents in client-facing materials.