The assessment was scoped to become the town’s own request for proposal. Not a findings document with a recommended next engagement attached — the actual input to a competitive procurement the client would run itself.
That is an unusual thing for a consultancy to write, and it is the right thing to write for a public body. A local government buying technology has to be able to show that it specified what it needed and took the best answer. An assessment that only its author can act on gives the town a sole-source problem instead of a requirement.
It is also the exercise this record has been on the other side of for nineteen years: writing the requirement well is most of getting a usable answer back, and evaluating the responses honestly is the rest. Doing it from the consultancy side, for a client who will then take the document to market against firms including your own, is the same discipline with the incentives reversed — which is a reasonable test of whether the discipline was ever real.
Outcome
A public body able to run its own competitive procurement from the assessment, rather than one able only to buy the next phase from the assessor.