Perhaps you are an expert at this already, but I know I had to learn the basics of onboarding consultants and working with them through the land of "hard knocks" via bumping into walls and learning as I went.
Here's one story not covered in the podcast that is illustrative of a hard lesson to learn (thankfully not mine):
While I was serving as the King County Office of Emergency Management director, we had been through the design process to build a combined $30 million Communications/911 Center and Emergency Coordination Center (ECC) that ended up being called the Regional Communication Emergency Coordination Center. The design took over a year and cost $1 million.
The Request for Proposals (RFP) stated the date and time by which all proposals had to be submitted and that none would be accepted after that time (there was a clock in the conference room). This was a formal process run by the county's procurement office, and anyone could attend the meeting. Immediately after the clock struck 2 p.m., it was announced that no more bids would be accepted. Then all bids were opened and the bid number announced. The lesson of all of this: less than two minutes after the deadline had passed, in dashed a young man with a proposal from a construction firm. Too bad, he was sent packing and the bid was not added to the pile.
Anyone who has gone through the process of preparing a proposal, let alone one for a $30 million construction project, had to feel bad for the young man, the firm and the staff who worked hard to put the proposal together. It could have been the winner — we'll never know.
