Tender Process and Contract Management Plan
Assessment Aims
This assessment is designed to consolidate your learnings from the second part of the course, in particular:
identifying a strategy for approaching prospective contractors together with a plan for how the prospective contractors’ submissions are to be assessed so that the criteria for approaching and selecting the contractor to be used meets the company’sparticular value for money requirements;
identifying an appropriate form of contract to be entered into and explaining how it is the most appropriate for the procurement scenario in question;
identifying the type of clauses that are essential to include in a procurement contract, as well as the clauses that are desirable but not necessarily essential to include;
drafting an overall Contract Management Plan, including identifying the principal risks that are likely to arise in the course of the contract, and devising a Risk Management Plan to manage those risks, and setting out a change management process to follow to address claims for variations to both the scope of works and costs;
review a procurement case study and reflect upon and analyse its efficacy to inform your contract management plan.
Assessment Scenario
For this assessment you are an internal Project Manager in the Project Management Office of Mines Are Us, a large national company based on St George’s Terrace in the Perth CBD.
You have been briefed to manage the overall needs of your company in contracting an external catering company to supply food and beverages and service staff to the flagship Perth corporate headquarters of your company.
This involves supplying the food and drinks and kitchen staff required for the internal staff kitchen, which provides a canteen for the staff to purchase lunch and refreshments during the working day. There are 300 staff who use the canteen, 150 of whom on average buy their lunch each day, and the other 150 buy drinks and snacks during the day.
The company has an internal commercial kitchen available for use, and a large staff dining room that seats 125 staff. Most staff take 45 minutes for their lunch break, and take it somewhere between 12pm and 1:30pm.
In addition, the company needs catering and service staff for approximately 250 business meetings involving external clients held in the company’s five internal conference rooms regularly throughout each year at various times between 8am and 5pm. Each conference room can seat up to 10 people, and three can be opened up together to seat 50 people seminar style. Of those meetings on average 70% require only tea, coffee and biscuits, and 20% require a light lunch of sandwiches and wraps and fresh fruit in the meeting rooms. The company requires a range of teas and coffees including lattes to be available. 5% require a hot meal for lunch to be served in the Board Room for up to 12 people, and 5% are seminar style meetings of up to 50 people which require platters of sushi, wraps and fresh fruit to be available at the start of the meeting with self-serve tea and filter coffee provided.
Mines Are Us can supply only 0.75FTE staff from the Project Management Office to oversee the whole of the catering operations, however the company still requires all catering staff and catering offerings to be of a standard befitting the head office of a large national company.
You now need to identify how to approach the market to locate the most suitable contractor to deliver the scope of works for the project, how to evaluate the contractors’ submissions, and select the most effective form of contract to enter into,. You need to think through at least three of the key risks that could arise in the course of the project, and design a plan to manage those risks. You are also required by the Project Sponsor to identify the types of clauses you consider to be essential for inclusion in the contract to be awarded to the successful tenderer, and to draft the Contract Management Plan to be implemented during the course of the contract which includes an outline of the change management process.
Question for Assessment 3: You are to prepare for consideration by the Project Sponsor (who is the CFO of the company):
a strategy detailing how to approach the market to identify the most suitable contractor to deliver the scope of works, together with an outline of how contractors’ submissions are to be assessed and a recommendation identifying the most effective form of contract for the company to enter into with the successful contractor; and
an outline of the types of contract clauses that you consider are:
(i) essential and must be included in the contract to be entered into with the successful contractor; and
(ii) desirable and should be included in the contract offered to the successful contractor; and
a Contract Management Plan, which includes (at least):
(i) a risk management plan or matrix addressing at least three key risks to the success of the project and the means of managing those risks; and
(ii) a process for the contractor to request changes to the scope of the contract after it has been entered into and to vary the costs, which includes the steps for approval/rejection of the requests and for making any subsequent change to the contract terms.
Your Contract Management Plan, to be complete, will also need to incorporate additional sections addressing the issues you consider to be essential to the procurement set out in the assessment question.
You do not need to draft the content of the contract clauses you propose, you are only required to identify the type of contract clause and set out a summary of how the clause should operate.
reference- Chicago 17th B
