That article conflates so many issues it’s impossible to know where to begin, except that MoD’s ‘procurers’ play a very small part in it.
The thread is about SDR and ‘bids’.
I doubt if there’s more than a handful here who have done the former. (Only one has ever declared himself, on the old Mull of Kintyre thread, and not in this context).
Fewer still have done the latter, if only because in the aircraft world the Service HQs only employed about 4 or 5 to do it. (In pre-computer days, when their output was accurate).
These civilians prepared the ‘Shopping Lists’ and staffed ‘Board Submissions’ or ‘Business Cases’; the level of approval depending on cost. Only then did the procurers get involved to any degree.
A personal aspiration of these junior staff, who were seen as the ‘owners’ of Service kit, responsible for availability, reliability and maintainability, and accountable directly to an Admiral (for the RN), was to be promoted to the most junior project management grade. (Think about that, and compare with current DE&S). The advantage they then had is self-evident, explaining in part why the success of a project is often entirely dependant on the manager’s background.
Most of the errors in what people term ‘procurement’ occur long before procurers get a chance to apply reality, by which time the money is set in concrete. So, a project can be vastly ‘over cost’, but below a fair and reasonable price – which is what the project manager actually signs for. Plainly, an aim is to reconcile the two, but that is largely outwith his gift.
Bottom line. The mandated rules are there. Implement them. They help you (the Service HQ) to avoid the avoidable, leaving the project manager to manage the unavoidable. If you don’t, he hasn’t a chance.