Class in Session: Project Management

Project procurement activities are often managed by specialists.  By this I mean that the procurement department takes over responsibility for purchasing and contract management from the project manager.  As a result of this separation of responsibilities, the steps and stages of procurement are often poorly understood by PMs.

In this and the next few blog submissions, I will attempt to shed light on procurement activities and relate these activities to the PMI PMBOK.

Procurement Steps

1. Make purchase decisions – Planning
Purchase decisions follow from project planning and analysis. Project needs are analyzed and compared with available resources and skills.  Anything the organization cannot provide must be procured.

2. Prepare bid documents
These documents include a SOW statement (Scope of Work), general terms and conditions, bid response instructions, and an explanation of how proposals will be evaluated (source selection criteria).

3. Distribute bid packages to potential vendors
Potential vendors can be identified through advertising, the internet, or through an organization’s qualified vendors list.

4. Bidder’s conferences
Bidder or vendor conferences are used to efficiently deliver detailed information to potential vendors.  The events offer an opportunity for vendors to ask questions and to hear questions posed by other potential vendors.

5. Receive responses from bidders
A suitable time-frame must be given for vendors to prepare bids.  Additional information and clarifications are often required by vendors.

6. Evaluate proposals
After all bids have been received, they are evaluated on the basis of a predetermined scoring system referred to as ‘source selection criteria.’  The comparisons are typically performed by experts from various disciplines related to the type of procurement.

7. Interview bidders
Short-listed bidders are interviewed to discuss details of their offers and to ensure a good fit with the purchasing organization.

8. Conduct negotiations
The leading candidate is invited to discuss (negotiate) contract details.  The issues that generally require clarification include such things as delivery date, shipping costs, warranty, and support.

To be continued……

Rules, rewards and penalties are needed to collectively encourage meeting owners to put in sufficient effort to ensure that meetings are productive.

Top Down
The establishment of rules and regulations begins at the top.  If mismanaged meetings are acceptable within an organization, it is because senior management permits them to be.  Change starts at the top.  Rot starts at the bottom.

The pathway to improved performance requires senior management awareness and effective feedback.

Problem Recognition
Senior management needs to define how they want meetings to be run.  Best practices need to be explained and demonstrated throughout the organization.

Feedback
Managers at all levels need to encourage best practices by rewarding desirable behavior and discouraging bad.
One organization that I have worked with had a practice of scoring meetings.  Every meeting involving more than three people ended with a quick performance review based on five variables ranked from 1 to 10.

The evaluations were tallied and averaged.  If a meeting received an overall score of less than 8 out of 10, a report and explanation had to be submitted to the meeting owner’s immediate superior.  This was meant to lead to corrective action.

At this company, the practice of giving meetings a ‘grade’ had a huge effect on how meetings were managed.  Not all of them were brilliantly run, but darn few were sloppy.

Best Practices
If meetings are going to be consistently well-run everyone needs to know how this can be achieved.  This means defining best practices and training staff in how to follow protocols for best results.

Feedback
After the training comes feedback, both bad and good.  People will only get better at something if they know what constitutes an improvement.  Feedback is what clarifies behaviors the organization does or does not want emulated.

Conclusion
Virtually everyone in a professional role can come up with a list of what goes wrong in meetings.  They recognize some, if not all, of the common problems.  Despite this widespread recognition, problems persist.

It is obvious that recognition is not enough.  Action, from the top down, is required to move people away from the lazy route and encourage them make meetings work.

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Meetings result in ‘decisions’ that imply ‘action items’. A meeting is only as productive as the decisions that are made and then correctly acted on. No follow through, no productivity.

If you called a meeting in order to arrive at decisions, then the decisions must be of importance to you. Therefore, it seems sensible that you (the meeting owner) should be responsible for ensuring that all decisions are acted on.

Success comes from planning

Like everything else, planning saves time and effort. You can either be reactionary in your efforts to follow through on action items, or you can be proactive during the meeting. Being proactive means taking the time during the meeting to develop a workable strategy.

Each decision must be associated with an action plan.

Clear Goals

The first step in a follow-through strategy is to ensure that every decision and related action item are clearly defined. Objectives and outcomes must be perfectly clear and agreed upon.

Named individual

A specific person, preferably someone present at the meeting, should be assigned responsibility for each action item. It is they who must understand the objectives and outcomes. They must know how success will be measured.

Milestones

Finding out after it is too late that something has not been completed is a waste of everyone’s time. Setting up milestones as pre-arranged reporting increments is the best way to ensure that you are not the last to know when things are not going as planned.

Escalation

Make it easy for a person assigned a task to get help. Discuss how to resolve problems and with whom. Make it clear that questions are preferable to failure.

Risk Management

A short discussion of uncertainties at the very beginning of the assignment process is a cheap way of highlighting potential sources of failure. Ask the person being assigned a task this simple question; “What might prevent you from getting this task done on time, as planned?” The answer might surprise you.

Follow-up

Well-run meetings are a lot of work, before and after. If a meeting is productive, it results in a lot of decisions, which each require follow-up. Do not drop the ball by running a great meeting and then leaving the final outcomes to chance.