Prequalifications

I had a conversation with someone the other day about prequalified lists, and legislation that affects who is 'qualified' to practice certain occupations within a province. ie some professional occupations like architects, nurses, engineers, radiologists, etc need to be registered within the province of BC to practice in BC. In the conversation, however, this colleague was talking about how a certain field of professionals in the US were ahead of the curve on a certain type of project. He was hoping they could attract more of them to their projects by having them partner with licenced professionals within the province.

This led me to think about the prequalification process. There are times that an Request for Qualifications/Request for Pre-Qualification (RFPQ) seeks to prequalify the actual resources (individuals) for future projects. The organization doesn't want the unknown of who would be available for their projects so they request resumes/experiences/accrediation information for individual resources to be put onto the list (not the firm itself). The downside to this type of RFPQ is the pure volume of individual resumes to be evaluated (so in some cases the organization will limit a company to only propose up to 5 key resources).

The other type of RFPQ prequalifies a firm for its ability to supply qualified resources, ie they do not need to qualify every individual but must prove they have a 'bank' of qualified resources and means to manage their time/availability. This means a swifter RFPQ evaluation, but doesn't guarantee the resource resumes attached to the response will be available when a project comes along....

So in terms of the conversation I had, in order for someone to use a professional from the US, they would require a 'team' approach using an RFPQ that prequalifies a firm to provide qualified resources. I'm not totally up on what the professional bodies would allow for in terms of using someone from out-of-province teamed up with a registered professional, but I would seek that information out before developing the RFPQ documentation.