From road worker to evaluation panel: 40 years in UK highways.

My name is Des Bourne, the owner and founder of Ariaconsult Limited.

My career roadmap is unconventional.

I left school at 16 without a plan to become a business development consultant. I started as a road worker with Shropshire's Roads and Bridges Department, learning the trade on-site while attending City and Guilds Day-release courses in Civil Engineering and Construction. I worked alongside designers, engineers, laboratory technicians, and site staff — and by 26, I was a local authority Principal Officer, helping shape how the council would deliver highway maintenance in the future.

I completed an HND in 2001, then became the Open University Business School's 10,000th MBA graduate. That qualification moved me from operational management into winning work, first as a bid manager, then a business development manager, adding competitive advantage, value proposition, and strategic planning to what I had learned on-site. This began a decade of major projects and long-term contract wins for Accord, Alfred McAlpine, Atkins, and other infrastructure contractors and consultants.

I was promoted to Atkins Business Development Director in 2006, and in 2011, I was appointed Managing Director of Atkins Highway Services. After leading the business through a period of commercial recovery, I steered its sale and transfer to Skanska in 2013, where I joined the senior management team to build strategic development as a formal enabling function. Including representing Skanska on a global market-making expert group working across the USA, the Nordics, and Eastern Europe, with HS2 as a prime example of that approach.

My journey eventually brought me to founding Ariaconsult in late 2020, working with highway contractors, specialist contractors, and contracting authorities on business development, work-winning, and critical friend independent challenge.

Why that roadmap matters now

That range of diverse environments, from the site cabin to the boardroom, from strategy to delivery, from Shrewsbury to Stockholm, is why I can do something most advisors in this space can't: understand what is important from multiple perspectives.

That is particularly valuable in the context of winning work with local authorities, where there is often a disconnect between what contractors and consultants offer and what local authority contracting authorities want to buy. My experience and insight from working on both sides of that table are where I add the most value.

Over the past year, I designed the evaluation methodology for a contracting authority's two-stage competitive procedure under the Procurement Act 2023, then moderated the panel, scoring and reaching consensus using MAT and PPQP. Most bid advisors have never been in that space. I have, and I bring that same understanding to Local Government Reorganisation, capture planning, and the procurement decisions authorities and contractors are navigating right now.

Why is my insight valuable to you if you are a contractor or consultant

I know what evaluation panels are actually scoring against because I've built the scoring model myself, not guessed at it from the outside. I know what the client evaluation panel is looking to read and hear when they ask questions about collaboration, continuous improvement, innovation, social value and low carbon. 

What this means for you if you are a contracting authority

I've sat as a Principal Officer shaping local authority delivery, and I've run procurement design from the client side. I know where two-stage procedures and evaluation methodologies succeed in helping you select the right partner, and where they quietly fail to help you avoid the wrong provider.

If you'd like to tap into four decades of operational, commercial, and strategic know-how, get in touch for a no-obligation conversation 

info@ariaconsult.co.uk  

Follow Des on LinkedIn:  www.linkedin.com/in/desbourne-ariaconsult