Using soft system methodology to approach social value outcomes in public procurement

Farag, FF; McDermott, P

Abstract

Social value in recent years has been attracting increased attention from public clients where policy documents encouraged clients to maximise their additional outcomes when procuring goods and services. However, social value studies in recent times show how there are problems accompanying its delivery with publicly procured projects, where confusion of definition among public procurers, the lack of methodologies and mechanics to calculate and implement the delivery processes and the absence of assessment and measurement methods caused hindrance to social value inclusion.
This paper discusses how using Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) would improve the delivery of social value outcomes for publicly procured projects. Since social value as a subject is considered to be of vague it cannot be approached in a similar way of well-defined construction deliverables, therefore SSM is adopted to accommodate its characteristics. The inability to define social value outcomes can be dealt with using the culture stream of inquiry specifically rich picture building which includes multiple stakeholder perspectives of reality. On the other hand, lacking methodologies and mechanisms to implement social value can be improved through logic based inquiry stream and Human Activity System modelling where stakeholders can have their input conceptualised into models which is compared to the real world situation to find most suitable answers. Measurement and assessment of social value can improve through improving the definition and the implementation processes.
This research does not claim to be empirical and could be seen as an explorative nature research of qualitative observational opinion. With the acknowledgment of this research limitation it can be viewed as a grounding base to a suitable research methodology approach used to explore a new subject such which is social value.

Citation

Farag, F., & McDermott, P. Using soft system methodology to approach social value outcomes in public procurement

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Publication Date: Nov 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: May 3, 2016
• Series Title: CIB Proceedings 2015: Going north for sustainability: Leveraging knowledge and innovation for sustainable construction and development
• ISBN: ISBN-9781326479510
• Publisher URL: http://www.irbnet.de/daten/iconda/CIB_DC28854.pdf