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Improving consultant-evaluation process
to benefit future consultant selection

A returning 2017 team at the recent Leadership Summit tackled the issue of leveraging consultant evaluations to ensure better selection on future projects. This protects a significant ongoing taxpayer investment in Idaho's state highways, bridges, and interstates.

"Currently, consultant evaluations are not used in the selection process," explained Contracting Services Engineer Monica Crider, who also was the Team Lead. "Our team's goal was to figure out how to make the evaluation step a value-added step." It was not a simple fix, however.

From a process perspective, the consultant's final evaluations are completed inconsistently, and often not at all. Everything was done manually, so documents would be printed, signed, scanned, and emailed, then printed again.

The team determined that SharePoint was the right tool to use to automate the process. Once the process is fully operational, consultants will be able to submit their progress reports and agreement administrators will review and approve them (and provide valuable timely feedback) within an electronic workflow.

And most importantly, perhaps, there would be a large enough sample size of evaluations to start using the consultant's collective scores in the selection process when hiring for future projects.

That, of course, is the point — to make stronger hiring choices to make sure we get the most out of taxpayer dollars invested in the highway system.

This will benefit the department, the consultant, and eventually the taxpayer with a more efficient process in the administration and qualifying selection of consiultants, who play a big role in meeting project delivery and consruction needs.

The new process is also expected to improve the number of projects that are closed out (evaluation is a major step in the closeout process. As such, this will allow any unobligated funds to be reassigned to other priorities. Currently, that list is approximately $3 million.

VIDEO: Check out the team's opening pitch at the summit.