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‘It was very important that the selection was not purely about technical ability,’ says the ODA’s head of procurement Morag Stewart. ‘It was about fit with the leadership team.’

The ODA allocated 25% of the assessment marks to soft issues.

The soft issues assessment exercise was a hectic one for the management teams of each of the four shortlisted firms. They were thrown into a typical management meeting with people from the ODA team, where several problems had to be resolved there and then. In the midst of all this there was a phone call about a potential industrial relations problem on site which took out the team leader, leaving number two in charge.

As well as providing a measure of soft skills, the workshop had an unexpected benefit for the afternoon session of the bid day, which was a more conventional technical presentation. Says Stewart: ‘When the teams came to do their three-hour session we had a clear understanding of who people were and what they could deliver.’

The winning consortium was CLM comprising CH2M, Laing O’Rourke and Mace. It had prepared well for the soft skills assessment with personality profiling and team building, above and beyond what would normally happen, according to Jaqueline Rast, senior vice president of CH2M Hill and bid team leader. ‘We spent a lot of time during the bid doing team building, using things like soft skills assessment to make sure our team was built properly and everybody knew their roles and responsibilities,’ she explains. Rast makes the point that a good team requires balance, so the first port of call in any selection of an individual is their skills and experience.

‘It forces bidders to think about who they are bidding and whether they can service the client team,’ she says. ‘In my opinion the combination of assessing soft skills and dialogue with the client really sort out whether two organisations really can work together.’