Plans inside plans…

Procurement is the process of acquiring goods and services.

In project management, it specifically refers to contracting for the supply of labor, equipment, materials – pretty much anything that the performing organization cannot internally supply itself.

If you are outsourcing work to a contractor, you will need to put in place a series of steps to manage the relationship.

We will discuss these in more detail in the next Module.

If you are performing work under contract, you must break the contract down into a series of manageable tasks.

Either way, for each task, you will need to:

• State the required deliverables and acceptance criteria
• List all deadlines, constraints, and other important considerations
• Determine required resources
• Grant a task owner authority commensurate with their responsibility
• Determine how time, cost, and the value of work to be performed will be measured and tracked
• Clearly relate activities to others (dependencies), and
• Establish meaningful cost accounts that will accurately match costs to progress.

And like every other task in your WBS, you will need to provide enough detail without being excessive, while retaining the flexibility necessary to respond to risks and realize opportunities.

Essentially, a procurement management plan is nothing more than the sum of tasks that relate to a specific procurement or contract otherwise in the project plan. 

So as with the quality management plan, you can organize, highlight, or lift these tasks from the WBS so that they might be more relatable to their owner(s).

Ultimately, though, everything that you have learned thus far and everything that you are yet to learn can be equally applied to the practice of project procurement.