This Jam was organized as part of the the VISO Research Project, carried out by the Simlab unit at Aalto University School of Science. This Jam was tailored for a small group of civil servants from the City of Vantaa.
Participants
Our Jammers of the day were Katja Koskelainen, Kai Weckström, Pertti Sopanen, Mikko Ilmonen, Johanna Friman, Leena Palander, Irma Tähkäluoto, joined by designer Eemeli Nieminen, research assistant Tiina Toskovic, and yours truly.
Scope of the Jam
The goal of this Jam was to create a short, practical and visual guide on how to do small procurements (below 30 000 €). The City of Vantaa has an intranet page where information on how to do small procurements is available, but this seems not enough to orientate people on how to do the purchase. This is because small procurements follow different rules and processes from “usual” larger procurements. For instance, people can make direct purchases without tendering, in case the expense is very small, but there are still rules to follow and in some cases there are pre-selected suppliers that need to be employed (and they are listed in a humongously long list that needs to be searched for).
Results & prototypes
The teams converged towards creating a one-pager summary of the process, that would be visual on one side and textual on the other: the idea was to explain in the simplest possible terms what the small procurement process looks like at the moment, what steps to do and which electronic procurement tools to use and when.
One team worked on the process diagram and one team focused on writing the step-by-step checklist. Links to key webpages and online procurement tools were added to the PDF miniguide, so users just need to click in order to be on their way.
