Creating strategic alignment during the development of procurement instruments

It is generally acknowledged that creating strategic alignment is key to achieving good procurement performance. However, when it comes to aligning procurement instruments with an organisation’s strategic goals, the literature is unclear about exactly how such alignment can be created in practice. Focusing on the process of procurement instrument development by public clients in the construction industry, this research explores how alignment with strategic goals can be created. Since procurement instrument development is portrayed in the literature as a highly intuitive and subjective process, this research examined how public clients can rationally and objectively create strategic alignment during this development process. This paper presents an action research case study on the development of a new procurement instrument. By interpreting strategic alignment as coherence in reasoning between procurement instrument design and multiple levels of strategy, it explains how several research interventions eventually resulted in creating alignment in practice. The results indicate that the rational and objective creation of strategic alignment requires that the reasoning behind procurement instrument design be made explicit and linked to the reasoning behind higher-level strategies. Since this can easily become complex, practitioners should master practical tools such as causal mapping to manage the complexity effectively.