7.2. Procurement Management

Procurement management follows a logical order. First, you plan what you need to contract; then you plan how you’ll do it. Next, you send out your contract requirements to sellers. They bid for the chance to work with you. You pick the best one, and then you sign the contract with them.

Once the work begins, you monitor it to make sure that the contract is being followed. When the work is done, you close out the contract and fill out all the paperwork.

You need to start with a plan for the whole project. Before doing anything else, you need to think about all of the work that you will contract out for your project. You will want to plan for any purchases and acquisitions. Here’s where you take a close look at your needs to be sure that contracting is necessary. You figure out what kinds of contracts make sense for your project, and you try to define all of the parts of the project that will be contracted out.

Contract planning is where you plan out each individual contract for the project work. You work out how you’ll manage the contract, what metrics it will need to meet to be considered successful, how you’ll pick a seller, and how you’ll administer the contract once the work is happening.

The procurement management plan details how the procurement process will be managed. It includes the following information:

• The types of contracts you plan to use and any metrics that will be used to measure the contractors’ performance
• The planned delivery dates for the work or products you are contracting
• The company’s standard documents you will use
• The number of vendors or contractors involved and how they will be managed
• How purchasing may impact the constraints and assumptions of the project plan
• The coordination of purchasing lead times with the development of the project schedule
• The identification of prequalified sellers (if known)

The procurement management plan, like all other management plans, becomes a subsidiary of the project management plan. Some tools and techniques you may use during the procurement planning stage include make-or-buy analysis and the definition of the contract type.

“13. Procurement Management” from Project Management – 2nd Edition by Adrienne Watt; Merrie Barron; and Andrew Barron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.