Project procurement becomes necessary when your project is so large that you don’t have skills or capacity within your team to do things yourselves in a cost-effective way. At this point, you need someone else to provide the goods or services that will supplement your team’s capabilities and resources.
The answer is Project Procurement Management.
Project Procurement is the process used to acquire goods and services from a third party provider, outside of the project.
Projects typically procure:
While the rules of public and private sector projects may differ, the fundamentals are the same. The differences tend to reflect the amount of transparency the process demands.
The public sector in many countries is bound by national or supranational regulation. These regulations impose obigations regarding openness to bidders, fair competition, reasonable timescales, and disclosure of certain information. Almost certainly, if you are working on a project that requires procurement from within the public sector, you’ll need to access the legislation, regulation, and guidance to which you are subject… And follow it scrupulously.
The private sector is freer to buy from whomever they choose, and to let contracts following any process they wish. However, many of the best commercial organizations choose to apply procurement processes that are every bit as rigorous as those of their corresponding public sector colleagues.
Projects may procure goods and services from either a within their own organization, or from an external provider.
For external providers, the procurement team will need to enter into a legal contract. Depending on the parties, it may be either the commissioner (project) or the provider who prepares the contract.
Where the provider is a part of the same organization, provision is often governed by a service-level agreement (SLA). These can be anything from a short memorandum, to a highly detailed document that is every bit as complex and rigorous as a contract.
There are many different types of contract you may use to govern the goods and services, and how you pay for them. Let’s survey the main types, and their primary features.
Here, most of the risk lies with the supplier. For the project, the risks are in specifying the needs accurately. The other disadvantage is the added cost of the supplier’s risk premium. A supplier will price in a contingency sum, because they carry the risk of over-run or quality defects.
A variation to this form can allow price adjustments based on certain triggering contingencies, or as a result of the parties agreeing that changes are appropriate. These are sometimes known as FP-EPA contracts, or Fixed Price with Economic Price Adjustment.
This contract is much like the one above. But, in addition, it has a positive (bonus) or negative (penalty) incentive for the supplier to deliver within or ahead of schedule. Note that in some jurisdictions, penalty clauses are not legal.
This works well where you know precisely what you need and its specification. But, you don’t know quantities accurately. It’s how we typically buy off-the-shelf components or services, although if you are buying in volume, you may negotiate a favorable discount on the unit price.
Also, you may come across the acronym ‘COTS‘, which stands for Commercial Off the Shelf.
This contract shares the risks between project and supplier. The contract sets a fixed maximum price (the target). If the supplier can deliver at less than that price, the parties share the difference. This requires trasparency of the supplier’s costs and accounting.
This contract form throws all the risk on the project. But it ensures the supplier is able to charge its base rates, with no premium for risk, because it knows it can recover all of its costs.
Consequently, this also requires full accounting trasparency, because the project will pay the supplier’s costs, plus an amount for the supplier’s fee. This fee can be:
This type of contract also places all of the cost risk on the project, but it reduces administrative overhead. The supplier charges for its services, based on a schedule of rates that the parties agree in the contract. It is the equivalent of a Unit Cost Contract, for services.
The materials refer to any costs the supplier incurs in the course of its work, which are acknowledged as chargeable in the contract. As well as literal materials, it can include:
There are four main process or stages to project procurement;
We’ll examine each one in turn.
If you are studying for your PMP or CAPM, this stage is equivalent to ‘2.1 Plan Procurement Management’ in the PMBoK. Your Project Procurement activities need to follow a procurement plan, which you develop to meet your project’s goal, objectives and scope. So, your task is to create a Project Procurement Plan.
Your project procurement plan will typically cover:
A valuable component of your procurement plan will be your work or product breakdown structure (WBS or PBS). This will identify the work to be done or the products to be created. They will therefore be your starting place in determining what elements of work you need to outsource, what products you need to procure, and what components you will need for products you propose to make.
You will also need to determine how you can deliver a particular piece of work most cost-effectively. This may be by doing it within the project team (‘make’) or by buying it from an external source (‘buy’). In making your Make-or-Buy decision, you will have regard to:
This is the equivalent of the PMBOK process 12.2 ‘Conduct Procurements’. There are two stages:
First, you need to gather your requirements and document them precisely. This also means setting out:
The next step is to find the most appropriate supplier. This is sometimes referred to as ‘Market Testing’.
The process for this may be set down in your organization’s policies and procedures. And you may also need to engage your Procurement Department.
If you are working within a public sector or publicly funded non-governmental organization, there’s more. It is also likely that you will need to comply with national or supranational legislation and regulations.
The basic process includes:
This is a live, webcast, video, or phone conference that allows you to:
Following this, there are different ways to request a response from potential vendors. This stage is full of three-letter acronyms and jargon:
If a bidder is interested, you may ask them for a formal EOI (Expression of Interest).
Before you receive any responses, you must determine the basis for your selection of your preferred bidder. If you select your evaluation criteria after you’ve received some or all of the bids, you run the risk of being accused of selecting evaluation criteria to advantage an already-preferred supplier. This would be a form of corrupt practice.
Your evaluation criteria – and the weights you apply to each of them – may include these factors:
It’s all about trading cost, quality and price to achieve best value. When you have agreed the criteria and your Sponsor or Project Board has signed them off, the next step is to develop a marking or scoring scheme. Typically, there will be some compliance factors. For these, a bid that fails to satisfy these factors will be excluded. You can then go on to score and evaluate all of the bids that are compliant.
[Note: the PMBOK refers to the bid documents above as outputs of the 12.1 Plan Procurement Management process.]It seems like there isn’t much to say here. One thing is especially relevant, however. In a formal procurement process, you need to set a deadline for receipt of bids from prospective suppliers. If a response arrives after the deadline; formally, you should contact the supplier and ask them to collect their bid. Your team should not open it and must certainly not read and consider it.
This can be a straightforward or an involved process. You need to conduct a robust evaluation against the criteria you have created. Following evaluation, you will make a formal determination of preferred bidder. You need then to take this recommendation to the person, people, or body that has the authority to sign-off this recommendation.
The final step in the market test is to enter into any final negotiations with your preferred bidder. If these go well, your legal team can draft a final contract that reflects the terms of the supplier’s bid. You can then award the contract formally, and both parties will then sign and properly endorse the contract according to legal procedures in your jurisdiction.
Your procurement contract may contain:
This process corresponds to the PMBOK process 12.3, ‘Control Procurements’. It is a real mix of formal and informal activities.
The PMBOK considers this an output of 12.3 Control Procurements. However, there are a set of tasks for this, and it is helpful to understand it as a specific part of your project work breakdown, and a stage of your overall project procurement process in itself.
So, the basic closing tasks for your procurement process are:
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Dr Mike Clayton is one of the most successful and in-demand project management trainers in the UK. He is author of 14 best-selling books, including four about project management. He is also a prolific blogger and contributor to ProjectManager.com and Project, the journal of the Association for Project Management. Between 1990 and 2002, Mike was a successful project manager, leading large project teams and delivering complex projects. In 2016, Mike launched OnlinePMCourses.
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