Why you need to CARES!

During a recent Commonwealth Government of Australia tender for the BuyICT panel, we came across a new evaluation criteria acronym: CARES.

This post should hopefully tell you why you need to care what CARES is all about!

Because it turns out CARES stands for:

• Circumstance: in which you need to set-out and explain the situation that arose requiring the use of your product or services.

• Action: where you explain the action item steps you took to address the issues at hand.

• Result: is pretty self-explanatory, but is where you detail the results of the actions you took. You also need to share any “key achievements” here, so don’t be shy!

• Ethical behaviour: this was an interesting one as you needed to detail how you used ethics to guide your decision-making. This criteria required evidence of how “fairness, honesty and integrity shaped your actions”.

• Sustainability: last, but not least, is sustainability. And while ‘sustainability’ here relates to lean, mean and green; the primary focus here relates to the ‘long-term effects of your solution’.

So What does this all mean?

Like most things, unsure at the moment.

But we highly suspect that evaluation criteria along the lines of CARES are going to be on the increase in Government (Commonwealth and State at minimum) tenders going forward so we strongly suggest your team structure their case study examples to knock these on the head.

For the record, the evaluation criteria weighting for each of the CARES elements in BuyICT was as follows:

• Circumstance - 5% weighting

• Action - 35% weighting

• Result - 30% weighting

• Ethical behaviour - 15% weighting

• Sustainability - 15% weighting

Get in touch if you want to know more!

BidWizard