顧問合約不是「價低者得」：兩個信封制度實際怎樣運作

When the government will engage consultants, and when it will not

Let us be clear about the threshold first: consultancy services exceeding $3 million generally require open tendering, which is significantly lower than the $7 million for construction and engineering services, but higher than the $1.35 million for goods and general services. Therefore, medium-sized consultancy assignments have a greater chance of entering the open procedure than engineering contracts of the same value.

As for why external consultants are engaged, the procurement brief is very specific: if the government does not have in-house staff with the required expertise and qualifications, or does not have them within the required timeframe, and taking into account the nature of the work and the time required, it is not appropriate to specially recruit or train staff for this purpose, the bureau/department will engage consultants. The required areas include support services in finance, management, engineering and architecture, as well as public relations.

This statement is useful for bidding strategy. It implies that the implicit premise of a consultancy invitation is that 'the government cannot do it itself or cannot do it in time.' If your proposal merely repeats capabilities the government already has, you have answered the wrong question; what you really need to prove is that you fill that gap.

The phrase 'or cannot do it in time' also explains a common situation: the government clearly has similar professionals in-house but still engages external consultants. This is usually related to the timetable, not a capability issue. When encountering such an invitation, the proposal should describe 'whether sufficient manpower can be deployed within the specified period' more concretely than the technical methodology, because that is exactly what the government is buying.

The implicit premise of a consultancy invitation is that the government cannot do it itself or cannot do it in time. The proposal must answer that gap.

Consultancy brief: the document equivalent to tender documents

Engineering contracts have tender documents, and consultancy assignments have a 'consultancy brief,' which serves the same purpose—providing information to assist you in preparing your proposal. The brief typically includes: the objectives and scope of the consultancy assignment, the required professional knowledge/experience, the experience/qualifications required for the team to carry out the assignment, team responsibilities, service period and schedule, information required for the proposal, the method for assessing the proposal, reports to be submitted at each stage, payment schedule and other terms, as well as any special matters in the consultancy services agreement.

Note one item: 'the method for assessing the consultancy proposal' is written in the brief. In other words, the scoring method is not something to guess; it is part of the document content. Reading that section carefully is usually more useful than writing ten extra pages of company profile.

Two more items that are easily overlooked but directly affect profit and loss: staged reports and the payment schedule. Cash flow in consultancy work is very different from engineering contracts—engineering is priced by quantity of works, while consultancy is paid by stage deliverables. If the brief hangs most of the payment on later reports, you will have to bear the manpower cost for the intervening months yourself. Before submitting a bid, matching the payment milestones against your manpower deployment curve is the most basic piece of homework.

The brief will also set out "any special matters in the consultancy services agreement". This section is usually the shortest, but it often conceals liability and insurance requirements. The liability period of a consultancy contract can be longer than the engineering contract itself, because the limitation period for design defects differs from that for construction defects—this point is worth deciding at company level rather than at bid level.

• Objectives and scope—to judge whether you have genuinely done similar work
• Required professional knowledge/experience, and the qualification requirements for team members
• Service period and time schedule—to determine whether you can deploy manpower
• Method of assessing proposals—that is, how the marks are allocated
• Staged reports and payment schedule—affecting cash flow

Two envelopes: the sequence is the key

The mechanism itself can be stated in one sentence: the technical proposal and the fee proposal must be placed separately in different sealed envelopes. But the real design lies in the sequence of handling—the procuring entity will first conduct a technical assessment of the proposals, and only then assess the fees. It is also expressly provided that the fee proposal may only be opened and assessed after the technical assessment has been completed.

So at the moment the technical assessment is carried out, the assessment committee does not know how much you are charging. The implication for pricing is: a low price cannot save a weak technical proposal, because at the time of the technical assessment the price is still inside an unopened envelope. Conversely, a technically strong proposal with a high price will not be eliminated in the first round.

Generally speaking, the scores obtained for the technical proposal and the fee proposal are added together, and the consultancy firm with the highest total score will be recommended for appointment. Note that the procurement brief does not publish a uniform technical-to-fee weighting ratio — the weighting is set out in the scoring methodology for each individual project, and the scoring methodology must be established before the invitation to submit proposals and must be approved by the relevant consultancy firm selection committee. To find out how a particular project is weighted, you can only refer to that consultancy brief.

You may be invited to explain your proposal

During the selection process, the procuring unit may invite consultancy firms to present their proposals. This step has no equivalent in the standard workflow of engineering contracts—clarifications of engineering tenders are generally handled in writing, whereas consultancy selection expressly permits oral presentations.

In practice this means two things. First, the team members named in the proposal should ideally be the ones who actually attend the presentation and do the work later; assigning one team to write and another to deliver is hard to conceal during the interview. Second, the presentation opportunity is part of the scoring process rather than an extra favour, and the level of preparation should match that for writing the proposal.

The presentation stage remains within the technical evaluation phase, so the fee envelope is still unopened. This means the interview discusses methodology, team and risk, not price negotiation. Treating the presentation as an opportunity for price-cutting negotiation is a complete misreading of the sequence.

Four selection committees: which one approves your submission

As with tender committees, consultancy appointments are approved by committees, and the division of responsibilities is not purely by amount but by professional category plus amount. This differs greatly from engineering contracts and is worth noting clearly.

The Architectural and Associated Consultants Selection Committee is chaired by the Director of Architectural Services and handles architectural and associated consultants for government engineering projects; the Engineering and Associated Consultants Selection Committee is chaired by the Director of Civil Engineering and Development and handles engineering and associated consultants; the Central Consultants Selection Committee is chaired by the Permanent Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury (Treasury) and handles all other types of consultants (excluding engineering and architectural, and excluding those handled by departmental committees); each Departmental Consultants Selection Committee is chaired by an officer at not lower than Directorate Pay Scale Point 2 and handles consultancy work with a contract value not exceeding $10 million.

Therefore an $8 million engineering consultancy contract may be handled by a departmental committee; likewise $8 million for management consultancy may also fall to a departmental committee. Once the amount exceeds $10 million, it goes to the corresponding Central/Architectural/Engineering Committee by professional category. All consultancy appointments must await the selection committee's acceptance of the procuring unit's appointment recommendation before they can be implemented.

Expression of Interest: for consultancy firms, this may effectively be the closing date

The procuring unit may directly invite consultancy firms to submit proposals, or may invite consultancy firms that have submitted an Expression of Interest and been preliminarily shortlisted to submit proposals. The second route has a significant impact on business development: if a project goes through EOI shortlisting, subsequent proposal invitations are issued only to firms on the list and will not be made public again.

In other words, missing the EOI notice means missing the entire project, yet the EOI stage typically does not appear to carry closing pressure—no tender documents, no bond, possibly just a company information form. Precisely because the threshold is low, it is easy to treat it as not urgent and let the deadline pass.

The Civil Engineering and Development Department lists these categories of notices separately: Invitation to Submit Expression of Interest for Consultancy Agreements, Invitation to Submit Technical and Consultancy Fee Proposals, Consultancy Agreement Forecasts, and Consultancy Agreements Awarded in the Past Six Months. To build a tracking habit, these four pages are more direct than any aggregation tool.

• Consultancy Agreement Forecasts—decide what qualifications and teaming to prepare for the coming year
• Invitation to Submit Expression of Interest—missing it means losing the entire project
• Invitation to Submit Technical and Consultancy Fee Proposals—the two-envelope process formally begins
• Consultancy Agreements Awarded in the Past Six Months—study competitors and commissioning patterns

Consultant Rosters: Four Offices, One Category Each

The Government's consultant rosters are kept in four separate places: the Management Accounting Division of the Treasury Branch of the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau maintains the roster of financial consultancy firms; the Digital Policy Office maintains the roster of general management consultancy firms; the Architectural and Associated Consultants Selection Board maintains the roster of architectural consultancy firms; and the Engineering and Associated Consultants Selection Board maintains the roster of engineering consultancy firms. Companies interested in joining may contact the relevant office directly.

Note the relationship between the rosters and tender eligibility, which is not entirely the same as the approved list of engineering contractors. Selective tendering for engineering contracts involves sending invitation letters to companies on the approved list; consultant selection, on the other hand, centres on the consultancy brief and the selection procedure, with the rosters being one of the Government's channels for understanding the market. Therefore, being on a roster does not mean receiving invitations automatically; you still need to keep a close watch on EOI and invitation for proposal announcements.

The fact that they are kept in four separate places has practical implications: a company that does both engineering design and management consultancy may need to apply to two offices separately, and the qualification requirements on the two sides are not interchangeable. If your business spans categories, it is worth first confirming which category the work you want to take on belongs to, and then deciding the order of applications, rather than submitting all four at once.

The Practical Differences Between Consultancy Contracts and Engineering Contracts

Putting the two systems side by side, the differences lie not only in procedure but in the fact that what you need to prepare is completely different. Competitiveness for engineering contracts comes mainly from price and group qualifications on the approved list; competitiveness for consultancy contracts comes mainly from team credentials and methodology, and price does not enter the comparison at all in the first round.

Another often overlooked difference is the liability structure. Engineering contractors deliver physical works, and defects are subject to clear inspection and warranty mechanisms; consultants deliver judgements and documents, and liability is harder to define through acceptance, so the special conditions of the agreement are often more onerous. This explains why tender decisions for consultancy contracts usually have to be made by senior management rather than by the tendering department alone.

The third difference is in how to track them. For engineering contracts, watching the tender notice is enough; for consultancy contracts, you need to watch four pages — forecast, EOI, invitation for proposal, and awarded — because each page corresponds to a different entry point in the process, and missing the first two pages usually cannot be remedied.

If you consider the selection unfair, there are formal channels

A consultancy firm that considers it has been treated unfairly may lodge a representation with the procuring entity or the consultancy selection committee responsible for approval; the procuring entity should give a substantive reply within ten working days; if a substantive reply cannot be given within the time limit, an initial reply should first be given.

Representations concerning breaches of the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement and the three free trade agreements with New Zealand, Chile and Australia are handled by the Independent Bid Complaint Adjudication Body established on 30 December 1998, with its secretariat at the Trade and Industry Department. Suspected corruption in selection should be reported directly to the ICAC.

It is worth noting that the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement sets a threshold of 130,000 SDR for government departments in respect of 'specified services', and 400,000 SDR for non-government public bodies (including the Airport Authority, Hospital Authority and Housing Authority). For procurement covered by the Agreement, the tender period is usually at least 40 days, longer than the general minimum of three weeks, allowing relatively ample preparation time.

Turning the system into tender decisions

Read the above mechanism in reverse and several concrete practices emerge. Since technical evaluation comes first and price is not visible during evaluation, the completeness of the technical proposal is the only entry ticket; undercutting to secure shortlisting does not hold up under the system. Since the scoring method is written in the consultant brief, the return on reading that section far exceeds padding the company background.

Since you may be invited to present, the people named in the proposal should be the ones who will actually do the work. Since there is no further public disclosure after the EOI, the tracking focus should be on the forecast and EOI pages, not on waiting for the formal tender notice.

Final line as always: this site only consolidates publicly available notices, for discovery and cross-reference. The consultant brief, scoring method, submission requirements and closing time are governed by the official notice.