Bibm788 Professional Project: Description Of Assessment Answers

Answer:

Introduction:

A project is known as the temporary criteria which are described by a start time and by an end time (Kerzner and Kerzner 2017). A project also consists of a distinct scope and some resources for its completion. The concept of the project management is effectively managing the defined project to meet the goal of the project in the provided timespan. Precisely it can be stated that it is the process or the application of the knowledge, tools, techniques and skills to fulfil the requirements of the project in the given timespan. The whole process of the project management is divided into 5 parts which are the initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and the closing (Larson and Gray 2015). This document particularly aims to discuss the contact management in the field of project management which will be discussed in the further section.

This document aims to understand the impact of the contract management in the field of the project management. The impact of this contract management has been introduced a better understanding of the problems which has the project manager faced for a particular project. The contact management has helped in the evolution process of the PMBOK.

 In this document, the description of the contract management will be discussed. The main characteristics and the principle of the framework will be discussed in this document with the underlying concepts. The context of the origin of the contract management will be discussed in this document. The impact of the contract management on the project management will also be evaluated in this document. The example of the application of the contract management will be evaluated in this case with the consideration of the project management.

Description of the Contract Management:

The contract management is the process of the managing the contracts which has been made with the employees, partners, vendors and the customers. Basically, this is the process of the efficient and systematic management of the contract analysis, creation and execution (Khan and Khan 2013). The main aim of the contract management is maximizing the operational and financial performance with minimized risks. The common examples of the commercial contracts are the purchase orders, utility orders, sales invoices and the employment orders (Goode, Kronke and McKendrick 2015). In the case of highly regulated service, complex contracts are required. The contract management has a total of three phases. These phases are the pre-contract phase, the execution phase and the post-award phase (Van Weele 2014).

 For many organization, the contract management is the self-service portal legal playbooks and the electronic signature. The contact management is very much important for every business. This contract management has total 8 number of stages which are the request, generate, negotiate, approval, execute, search, comply and the review (Turner 2017). Through this eight stages, the contact management helps to improve the efficiency of the business. With various types of benefit, this contact management has various types of challenges also (Johnson 2014). The manual process of the contract management is one the main reason for the bottleneck in the cycle of the sales. This bottleneck issue arises due to the manual process of the contract management. This manual process also brings a various type of errors in the system. This errors included the non-compliance, sales cycle time extension, leakage of the revenue and jeopardised a relationship with the customer. On the other hand, the automatic process of the contract management brings various types of advantages to the organization.

Underlying Concepts of the Contract Management:

 A contract is very much essential for the completion of a project of an organization as it creates the project organization. Thus the contract management is an essential part for the project management. The problem of the organizing defines that it is a process of transforming the conflict system into the cooperative system. In a conflict type of system, every individual has some objectives, but it is not consistent as it is not joined (Harte et al. 2016). In a cooperative system every individual act rationally (Grønbæk et al. 2017). The conflict system arises due to the opportunism and for the bounded rationality. To reduce the chances of occurring the conflict system both the opportunism and the bounded rationality need to be minimized. This minimization can be achieved, and for this, the clients need to:

• Increase the flow of the communication between the participants of the project. This can ensure that every participant gets sufficient information about the project. Thus they can behave rationally (Sherif 2015). With that, the chances of occurring the deceit need to be reduced as on this the opportunism depends.
• The participants of the project need to be correctly incentivized. So that the participants of the project share the common objective autonomously.

The relationship of the contract management determined an appropriate structure of governance which can be used for achieving these points.

The analysis of the transaction cost is a typical cost examination of the comparative planning cost, task completion monetarization under the alternative structure of the governance and the adapting (Brouthers 2013). This helps to align the transaction with the government structure in a perceptive way. In this case, the cost of the planning, monitoring the task competition and the adapting will be determined under dissimilar contract terms for the payment. Then it will be determined that how this different type of the contract generates the arrangement which supports the cooperative system through the goal alignment.

Principles of the Contract Management:

 The contract management runs on some sets of principles. These principles are discussed below:

• In the contract management, it needs to be ensured that the contract is known and understood by all of the participants who are involved in the project (Grant, Wong and Trautrims 2017). Adequate resources need to be identified before the award of the contract.
• Roles, responsibility and the accountability needs to be clear for a perfect contract project management. The contacts must have a contract management plan which is documented.
• Strong governance plan must be arranged which is useful for enabling the strategic oversight and for managing the risks. In this case, the governance structure is suitably designed and empowered which can help to support the business objectives and the business outcomes.
• For perfect contract management, a differentiated approach needs to be adopted which is based on the risk. For this case, the strategical and the tactical contracts for the business needs to be distinguished. A self-managing approach can be considered for the high-risk contracts (Raj, Walters and Rashid 2017).
• The principle of the contract management defines that a change in the contract life will occur and for that proper planning needs to be developed early. Flexible approaches must be developed by combined working with the supplies of the project. It also defines that changes may occur in the contract, but the main strategic intent of the contract must remain the same (Hughes, Champion and Murdoch 2015). For this senior level assurance need to be ensured.
• The performance needs to be measured and also needs to report accordingly. The KPI of the organization and the data efficiency can be used for incentivising the good performance (Yin, Wang and Yang 2014). The contracts needed to be administrated efficiently and proactively. This will maximize the use of the performance and the benchmarking data. A balanced scorecard is used for measuring the relationship management and the customer satisfaction with the focus of the outcome achievement. Quick reactions are needed when issues arise.
• Continuous improvement is needed in the contract management. With that value for money, service must be given, and innovation must be done (Clark, Silvester and Knowles 2013). This can be achieved by the usage of the contract tools.
• The contractor and the project client must work together as a team to produce the preferred outcomes of the project in the estimated time of the project.
• The wide SRM programmes must be linked with the government and with the organization to capture the performance and the relationship issues.
• Mature commercial behaviours must be adopted and encouraged properly. For this, it needs to understand that what controls the behaviour of the suppliers. Also, the appropriate commercial structure needs to be implemented.

Main characteristics of Contract Management Framework:

The contract management is a very much complex process which includes various types of activities. The main characteristics of the contract management framework divided into four parts. First is creating the contract management team and the governance. The second one is the establishing, planning and execution of contract management. The next is the management of the relationship. The last one is the management of performance.

In the first stage of the framework the time when the team of the contract management will be formed as described with that the structure of the team and responsibilities and roles of the team described. In the next framework of the contract management, it is monitored that the roles and responsibilities are fulfilled under the criteria of the contract and reported accordingly (Festing and Schäfer 2014). In the framework of the relationship management, a brief engagement is done between the partners of the project. This establishes a proper communication system between the parties throughout the life cycle of the project. In the last stage of the framework, the performance is assessed. In this assessment the services which are delivered by the service provider or the contractor is assessed in the sense that it is meeting the required standards or not.

Context of the Origin of the Contract Management:

The main origin of the contract management was the contract laws of the early days. In the early days, this process of the contract management was totally offline. In that time only the simple word processor and the spreadsheets were used. For sharing this files, one shared drive was used. For adding a new contract, the creator needs to find the most updated template which was available on the shared drive on that time (Monczka et al. 2015). Initially, this system was good, but as the number of the contracts increased with the time, this system of the contract management starts creating problems.

To mitigate this issue, SaaS was introduced. By using the SaaS these systems were able to improve the requesting processes, negotiating contracts, authoring and approving the contract (Gallegos 2013). Initially, this system was performing well, but with the time many of this internal system cluttered with the drafts which are outdated. This created a problem for the staffs to find the latest editions of the document, track the changes and to react in a certain amount of time when a contract expired.

Finally, to solve all the problems contract management software is introduced. This software automatically limits the error done by the humans. A contract can be done in this software very easily and quickly after the approval of it. All the changes in the contract can be tracked easily. The most important and the vital things for this contract management software is that it is able to scale the liabilities issues and the relieving workflow to achieve the greatest growth.

Impact of the Contract Management on the Project Management:

The contract management has various types of positive impact on the project management. The project management particularly focuses on the operations of the business that have an estimated time of finishing and a predetermined budget and revenue flow. Many projects are often unique, and for this many times, the project manager needs to gather resources from the outside contractors. For this reason, the contract negotiations become an essential part for the project management and for this the contract management is the only solution. Thus the contract management possesses various positive impact on the project management which will be discussed below.

Service and price negotiations:

The contract management helps the project managers to generate more revenue for a particular project. The contract management helps to negotiate the prices of service provided by a particular contractor. In this negotiation process, the contract management helps to lower the prices for a service given by a contractor. Both of the parties satisfied in this process, but the quality of the service remains intact.

Timeframe importance:

In any type of project management, the time frame of the project plays a vital role in the context of successful completion of the project. For meeting the deadline of a project the project manager gives a particular date to the contractor in which the contractors must finish the job to get paid (Fleming and Koppelman 2016). To manage all of these deadlines of the contractors the contract management is required. Thus the contract management helps the project management process to complete within the particular time frame successfully.

Delegation and Liability:

The contract management helps the project management process by passing the liabilities in certain cases that the current business of the organization cannot be kept on hold for some activities which are not performed by that particular contractor. Thus it brings fluency in the business process of the organization which is indirectly helping the project management of that business or organisation. Also, the contract management defines how the contractors of the project will hire and pay the external sub-contractors.

Ensuring desired project:

The contract management helps the project manager to ensure the desired outcome of the project. In many cases, the project management process requires a project to be completed in some specified specifications which will produce some particular results. In this case, the contract management specifies that particular results to the contractors. For example, the process of the project manager may require the project to be completed by using some specified materials or standards.

Examples of the Contract Management Applications:

The Contract Management software not only managing the contacts of the organization. With the contract management, the other applications of the contract management are that it is able to connect the business cycle of the other companies. This process is seamless where the data can be stored and easily according to the needs of the users.

 One of the examples of this contract management software or the solution is the DocLogix. The main features of the software are, it provides agreement, storage, signing, approval and preparation. Some changes are determined in the sales after using the software which is the higher team attention in the quota of the sales. The sales team is achieving more sales quota compared to the previous one. The cycle of the sales also decreased with the introduction of the DocLogix in the project management. It is determined that this solution has improved the sales cycle by 24%. Conversation rate is also increased by the introduction of this software solution. Proposal volume is also increased with the implementation of this software.

Conclusion:

From the above discussion, it can be concluded that the contract management has a huge role in the context of project management run a project efficiently. The contract management helps the project management by managing various types of parties involved in a single project. Thus efficient project management can be achieved. In this document, a brief about the contract management is discussed. Underlying concepts of the contract management is evaluated in this document. The main principles of the contract management are also discussed in this document, and with that, the context of the origin of the contract management is discussed. In the second part of this document, the impact of the contract management in the project management is discussed thoroughly. In the last part of the document examples of the contract management application is given.

References:

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Clark, D.M., Silvester, K. and Knowles, S., 2013. Lean management systems: creating a culture of continuous quality improvement. Journal of clinical pathology, pp.jclinpath-2013.

Festing, M. and Schäfer, L., 2014. Generational challenges to talent management: A framework for talent retention based on the psychological-contract perspective. Journal of World Business, 49(2), pp.262-271.

Fleming, Q.W. and Koppelman, J.M., 2016, December. Earned value project management. Project Management Institute.

Gallegos, R.K., 2013. Software As A Service (No. SAND2013-3950C). Sandia National Lab.(SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States).

Goode, R., Kronke, H. and McKendrick, E., 2015. Transnational commercial law: text, cases, and materials. Oxford university press.

Grant, D.B., Wong, C.Y. and Trautrims, A., 2017. Sustainable logistics and supply chain management: principles and practices for sustainable operations and management. Kogan Page Publishers.

Grønbæk, K., Grudin, J., Bødker, S. and Bannon, L., 2017. Achieving cooperative system design: shifting from a product to a process focus. In Participatory Design (pp. 79-97). CRC Press.

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Hughes, W., Champion, R. and Murdoch, J., 2015. Construction contracts: law and management. Routledge.

Johnson, P.F., 2014. Purchasing and supply management. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Khan, A.W. and Khan, S.U., 2013. Critical success factors for offshore software outsourcing contract management from vendors’ perspective: an exploratory study using a systematic literature review. IET software, 7(6), pp.327-338.

Larson, E.W. and Gray, C.F., 2015. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: PMBOK (®) Guide. Project Management Institute.

Monczka, R.M., Handfield, R.B., Giunipero, L.C. and Patterson, J.L., 2015. Purchasing and supply chain management. Cengage Learning.

Raj, R., Walters, P. and Rashid, T., 2017. Events management: principles and practice. Sage.

Sherif, M., 2015. Group conflict and co-operation: Their social psychology. Psychology Press.

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Van Weele, A., 2014. International contracting: Contract management in complex construction projects. World Scientific.

Yin, S., Wang, G. and Yang, X., 2014. Robust PLS approach for KPI-related prediction and diagnosis against outliers and missing data. International Journal of Systems Science, 45(7), pp.1375-1382.