If you've ever run an open call, a grant round, or a supplier due diligence process, you'll know that receiving applications is the easy part. What comes next (assessing them fairly, at scale, with multiple judges, under time pressure) is where things tend to get complicated.
Spreadsheets start multiplying. Emails get missed. Conflicts of interest surface at inconvenient moments. Assessors aren't sure what they're supposed to be evaluating. Deadlines slip. And by the time you're trying to pull together a coherent picture of the judging outcomes, the programme manager has spent more time chasing people than running the programme.
Assessment is one of those areas where the operational detail really matters, because if it goes wrong, it doesn't just create admin headaches. It undermines the integrity of the process itself.
We've spent a lot of time thinking about how to get this right. Here's what that looks like in SimplyDo.
Setting Up Without the Complexity
The first challenge in any assessment process is the setup: who is assessing what, under what criteria, and how do you get everyone briefed and ready to go?
SimplyDo's assessment setup wizard walks programme managers through this end to end. You define your assessor pool, which can be internal staff, external experts, or a hybrid of both, and the platform handles the rest. It automatically detects whether assessors are internal or external and sends the right communications accordingly: notification emails for internal users, invitation emails for external ones.
Those communications aren't generic. Each assessor receives automatically generated assessment criteria documentation, drawn from the framework you've configured, along with an onboarding quick-start guide. The goal is that by the time an assessor opens their first application, they know exactly what they're looking at and what they're being asked to evaluate. No chasing people for briefing packs, no assumptions that everyone has read the same documents.
The assignment mechanism itself is designed for the many-to-many reality of serious assessment processes: multiple assessors per application, each assessor handling multiple applications, configured according to whatever logic your programme requires.
Multi-Stage Judging
Most meaningful assessment processes aren't a single event. They're a sequence: an initial sift to remove clearly ineligible or weak applications, a formal assessment stage with a fuller marking framework, and then perhaps an interview or pitch round for shortlisted candidates.
Each of these stages may involve different assessors, different subsets of applications, and different evaluation criteria. SimplyDo supports this natively. Each round of assessment within a programme can be configured independently (different assessor pools, different frameworks, different weighting) without needing to rebuild the process from scratch each time.
This matters particularly for programmes with real governance requirements: public sector procurement, innovation grants, or supply chain due diligence processes where the audit trail of how decisions were made is as important as the decisions themselves.
Handling Conflicts of Interest
Conflicts of interest are an inevitable feature of any assessment process that involves real expertise, because the people qualified to judge applications are often the people who know the applicants. Managing this manually is error-prone and uncomfortable.
SimplyDo handles it through a dedicated self-declaration mechanism. Assessors are prompted to flag any conflicts before they begin reviewing, and programme managers can see these declarations and reassign applications as needed. It's built into the workflow rather than sitting outside it, which means it actually gets done.
Set It and Forget It
One of the most time-consuming parts of running an assessment round is the ongoing management: chasing assessors who haven't started, sending reminders as deadlines approach, keeping track of who has completed what.
SimplyDo automates this. Once the assessment is configured and launched, the platform handles follow-up reminders and deadline warnings automatically. Assessors are nudged without programme managers having to manually track progress and send individual emails. If something needs attention (e.g. an assessor who is behind, a conflict that needs resolving) it surfaces in the platform rather than hiding in an inbox.
The aim is a process you can genuinely set up and trust to run, rather than one that requires constant manual intervention to keep on track.
Reporting and AI-Assisted Oversight
When assessments are completed, programme managers need to make sense of the outcomes, sometimes across dozens or hundreds of applications, with input from multiple assessors who may have weighted things differently.
SimplyDo's built-in reporting allows programme managers to review completed assessments, compare scores and notes across assessors, and get a coherent view of the judging outcomes. AI-generated summaries provide an overview of each application's assessment, drawing out the key themes and points of consensus or disagreement across judges.
The same AI capability supports assessors during the process itself. Rather than expecting judges to read lengthy applications in full and then locate the relevant information for each criterion, SimplyDo generates assessor guides that do this work automatically, helpfully surfacing the parts of each application that are most relevant to the marking framework. The result is more consistent, more focused assessments, and less time spent searching for information that should be easy to find.
Why This Matters
Robust assessment isn't just a compliance requirement, though it is that. It's what gives an innovation programme its credibility: with applicants, with stakeholders, and with funders. An open call that can't demonstrate it assessed applications fairly and consistently isn't just administratively weak; it's vulnerable.
As public sector bodies take on more active roles as programme managers and funders, something we've written about in the context of LIPF and the Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund, the demands on assessment infrastructure are only going to grow. More applications, more stages, more governance scrutiny, more pressure to demonstrate impact and accountability.
SimplyDo's assessment capability is designed for exactly that environment: flexible enough to handle the variety of real innovation programmes, robust enough to support the governance requirements that come with public funding, and automated enough that running a rigorous process doesn't require a dedicated team just to manage the admin.
If you're running an open call, a grant round, or a due diligence process and want to see how this works in practice, we'd love to show you.
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