Rationale

For most public authorities, the specific skills required for running the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan process will exceed the capacities of their staff. The aim is to cover immediate skill requirements by contracting external experts if needed, but also to develop and maintain expertise of Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning within your own organisation.

Aims

• Balance short-term skill requirements and build capacity within your own organisation and in the wider professional community.

• Facilitate an efficient planning process that makes the best use of resources.

• Add value to the SUMP by cooperating with experts that contribute new approaches or fresh perspectives on key issues.

Tasks

• Based on your strategy to cover skill gaps (see Activity 1.1), decide for which tasks external support is needed, if they cannot be efficiently covered through internal capacity building (or the recruitment of new staff).

• Consider getting external support for tasks for which a lack of skills in your organisation would reduce quality or prolong the process considerably if attempted internally.

• Decide if tasks could be tendered as a bundle (normally tasks that are closely related to each other, e.g. citizen engagement and communication) or require very specific skills and need to be tendered separately (e.g. data collection, or, even more specifically, a household survey or an analysis of cycling infrastructure quality).

• Tender and contract external services for the selected tasks. Use clear terms of reference that describe the tasks as precisely as possible, including a timeline and concrete outputs for each task. Use suitable criteria for the selection of offers, which need to be specified in the terms of reference. In addition to the price, you should give proper weight to content criteria (e.g. quality of the described concept and methods, and the expertise of offered personnel). Experience has shown that quality pays off, and unrealistically low offers often lead to low-quality results or follow-up costs for cities.

• When delegating project management activities to a consultant, keep the overall coordination within your planning authority. For all delegated tasks, always foresee sufficient time and resources for quality management by your organisation. Integrate capacity building activities in terms of reference whenever possible so that your internal staff can gain the respective competencies for the next planning process.

Timing and coordination

• Take into account the timing of planned tenders when developing the timeline and work plan.

• Conduct tendering and contracting only after receiving political mandate and approval of the work plan.

Checklist

✔ Decision made on which tasks to get external support for (if any).
✔ Services tendered and suitable contractor chosen who understands the SUMP approach.

Examples of tasks to get external support on: