Capital project owners in the public and private sectors are increasingly becoming keen on improving their contract procurement practices to improve their procurement performance driving cost savings, improving probity, delivering improved outcomes, and meeting their broad range of organization objectives. This requires adopting the contract management best practices during the complete contract procurement phases including prequalification, tendering, awarding, and post-awarding contract management phases of contracts. The Contract Management Guidelines document those practices to enable project owners to adopt a sound, consistent and effective approach to managing their contracts.
The post-award contract management is the most critical phase and the one that takes the longest time to execute in the contract procurement phases. Good post-award contract management is the process that ensures both parties to a contract fully meet their respective obligations as efficiently and effectively as possible, to continually deliver both the business and operational objectives required from the contract. Post-award contract management involves several processes that cover contract mobilization, contract administration, record-keeping, contract management roles and responsibilities, managing relationships, performance management, contract monitoring, negotiating contract variations, managing contract disputes, contract completion, and closeout including demobilization.
To ensure that those post-award contract management processes have been performed by the contract management guideline, a checklist can be created to become a guide for Contract Managers on the steps that need to be performed on capital projects. Each capital project owner needs to develop a checklist that must be aligned with their contact management guidelines as well as the terms and conditions of contract agreements they use.
A Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb maps the complete contract procurement phases including prequalification, tendering, awarding, and post-awarding contract management phases of contracts for each project managed by the project owner. Details on how to manage each contract procurement phase process have been presented in different PMWeb blog articles.
PMWeb also helps to create a contract management checklist similar to the checklist shown below, which is an example of a checklist developed by a public-sector capital project owner. The checklist groups the steps or actions that need to be performed at the pre-commencement stage and post-contract commencement stage. For each step or action, the checklist details who should be performing the step or action, if it was performed, when it was performed, and which PMWeb module is being used. The entities that could be involved in performing a step or action include the contract manager, procurement department, risk management department, and contractor. The checklist can provide a quick audit of the contract management steps or actions that need to be performed.
The checklist is grouped into two stages, pre-construction, and post-contract commencement. The preconstruction stage includes actions that cover contract documents, a transition plan, a contract management plan, insurance, security/ retention, key performance indicators (KPIs), risk management and health, safety, and environment (HSE) plans, contract meetings, and an induction program. The post-contract commencement stage includes the actions of audit contractor compliance with the health, safety, and environment (HSE) plan, contract meetings, payment claims, performance auditing, contract extensions, and contract expiry/ transition out.
The PMWeb attachment allows attaching documents that are relevant to the checklist which is usually uploaded and stored in the PMWeb document management repository. In addition, links to relevant PMWeb records and imported MS Outlook emails can be linked to the checklist.
