It seems incredible that the procurement tennis that Dr Pedro Telles and I started on 16 February 2015 (see here and here) has come to an end with today's comments (Pedro has also declared game over). Thank you all for reading and contributing to the debate, and for the encouragement we received from so many of you!
In April, Peter Smith wrote about our 'Herculean' task. In his kind words 'by the time Telles and Sánchez Graells have finished, this will be a
considerable and useful resource for public procurers. And although the
material is by definition somewhat technical at times, it is accessible
for practitioners and it should be essential reading for anyone
interested in staying within EU and national rules, yet also getting the
most flexibility possible out of the regulations in order to generate
better results and performance.' We hope we have delivered to those high expectations.
In any case, as a result of these 244 posts, we have a pretty bulky draft of what could become a more formal commentary to the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.
We are thinking about ways of polishing and improving the material, as
well as platforms to make it available both online and in print. Any
suggestions would be welcome. We will keep you posted.
On the 'human' side of the project, Pedro published some reflections on the experience half way through (30 June 2015). I will still need some time to digest this project, which has made blawging certainly more intense than it used to be for me. I guess that the only lesson I have really learnt is that committing to blog daily on a predetermined topic is quite a challenge. So don't!
I now look forward to the freedom of choosing what to blog about, and I hope some of the readers of How to Crack a Nut will remain interested despite the likely change of focus away from public procurement, at least for a while. I hope I will not have too much writers block...