The structure of the tender
The structure of the announcement is made up of the following points/articles:
- premises and data of the assignment;
- tender documents, clarifications and communications;
- subject of the contract, amount and division into lots;
- duration;
- modification of the contract during execution;
- price revision, advance payment and acceleration bonus;
- subjects admitted individually and in groups, conditions of participation;
- general requirements and causes of exclusion;
- special order requirements and means of proof;
- professional suitability requirements;
- technical and professional capacity requirements;
- guidance on special requirements in temporary groupings;
- indications on special requirements in stable consortia of professional and engineering companies;
- availment;
- subcontracting;
- participation requirements and/or execution conditions;
- provisional guarantee;
- inspection;
- ANAC contribution payment;
- methods of submitting the offer;
- preliminary assistance;
- application for participation and administrative documentation;
- technical offer;
- economic offer;
- award criterion;
- selection commission;
- carrying out tender operations;
- verification of administrative documentation;
- evaluation of technical and economic offers;
- verification of anomaly of offers;
- awarding of the contract and signing of the contract;
- obligations relating to the traceability of financial flows;
- codes of conduct;
- access to documents;
- settlement of disputes;
- processing of personal data.
The most important elements
In an attempt to pursue greater application uniformity, the tender has developed a series of aspects that have led to many interpretative critical issues in relation to the tender procedures for the assignment of architecture and engineering services, such as:
- participation requirements;
- the determination of the tender amount;
- the correct valorization of the professional experiences of the operators;
- the methods of preparing the offer with the request for a declaration from the operators regarding the use of artificial intelligence in the preparation of the same;
as well as a series of clarifications regarding:
The valorization of new themes
With respect to the regulatory and procedural innovations included in Legislative Decree 36/2023 and subsequent regulations, the tender scheme brings together a series of procedural aspects such as acceleration bonuses or the advance payment of operational fees constituted by BIM (Building Information Modeling) or CAM (Minimum Environmental Criteria) which, in addition to representing now mandatory regulatory requirements, also constitute an operational method of great importance, also in terms of the overall quality of the design, executive and intervention management.
What remains to be noted, and it could not have been the tender scheme that developed the problem, is the importance of selecting the criteria and sub-criteria of the most economically advantageous offer which represent the borderline between the construction of an evaluation model of the offers truly capable of:
- overcome the discretion and randomness of the choices made by the majority of tender commissions, especially when clear, effective evaluation criteria linked to specific results are not provided;
- identify objective and non-interpretable criteria for assigning the scores assigned, in the grid of the various evaluation criteria and sub-criteria, to identify the technical offer that truly represents the most suitable solution for achieving the various objectives expected by the contracting authority.
Only at the end of a work of preparation of the tender notices that is not a mechanical superposition of compilation articles will it be possible to have a tool for managing the tender procedure even by commissioners who are not perfectly competent in the various specifics, and it will be possible to overcome that condition of indeterminate discretion that has made the majority of design tenders a mere assignment of tasks that have penalized quality proposals.
Download the standard notice and application form here
Below you will find the standard announcement no. 2/2026 relating to“Open procedure for the awarding of public contracts for architectural and engineering services of an amount equal to or greater than the thresholds of European relevance referred to in Article 14 of Legislative Decree 31 March 2023, No. 36 with the criterion of the most economically advantageous offer based on the best quality/price ratio” and related application for participation:
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