Fit for business: modifying internal procurement processes to suit adaptive MSD programmes

Adaptive management - deliberate and iterative learning for navigating complexity - is central to market systems development. Programme teams adjust interventions, add and drop market actor partners, and pivot sectors as their knowledge of market systems improves. Yet each of these decisions has financial and legal implications. The underlying organisational and contractual infrastructure for MSD can easily be taken for granted and most adaptive management guidance is focused on technical issues.

This paper identifies key principles for MSD programme managers who want to modify internal procurement processes that allow adaptation of partnership agreements and contracts.

These include the importance of building trust and relationships with operations leaders and staff in programme teams at the HQ level and with donor agencies.

About the MSD Procurement Series

It is a collaborative product of a group of accomplished MSD practitioners and donors who worked together voluntarily in knowledge clinics over four months in early 2020 to synthesise their accumulated knowledge and experience of procurement arrangements for programmes that use the MSD approach. 
Watch the BEAM webinar - How to do MSD procurement: practical insights from donors and implementers - where clinic participants discussed their findings.
Links to the other papers are below.