You negotiated it. Now you're managing it too.

wop. field notes

Hey {{first_name|there}},

You spend weeks getting a supplier contract agreed. Price, scope, liabilities, the usual back and forth. It gets signed, someone in the business is named as the owner, and procurement moves on.

Then the supplier underdelivers. The person using the service forwards the problem to you. You negotiated the contract, so apparently you're now running it as well.

Somewhere in that handover, we've decided that putting a name against a contract means someone is equipped to manage it. That's asking quite a lot of a name in a spreadsheet. Procurement gets pulled back in, and the business waits while everyone works out what was actually agreed.

For me, the handover is our first test of whether we've set the business up to get what it bought. Good contract management keeps asking that question throughout the agreement. The answer should shape what we do with the supplier next.

What did we hand over?

The signed agreement matters. So do the conversations about why the business bought this service, what a good result looks like, and what worried people during the negotiation. A folder full of documents can lose quite a lot of that context.

Take a supplier who responds to every incident within its agreed time, but keeps having to fix the same fault. The monthly report looks fine. The people using the service are still losing time.

The contract owner needs to spot that gap and explain its effect on the business. They need enough time and access to collect the evidence, then get the supplier working on the underlying problem. If resolving it requires a change to the service or commercial terms, they need to know who can agree that.

Sending them the contract PDF leaves quite a few of those questions unanswered.

What good contract management looks like.

Before closing the next handover, take one commitment that matters to the business and talk it through with the person taking over. How will they know it is being delivered? What will they do if it isn't? Where will they need help?

The answer might reveal that they cannot see the performance data. Or that they have been given the responsibility alongside a full-time job, with no time to do it. Sort that out, and agree when the owner, supplier and relevant people in the business will review how the service is actually working. The importance of the contract and the pace of change should determine how often you do that.

For the supplier with the recurring fault, bring the incident history and the effect on users into that review. Ask the supplier to investigate the cause and agree what it will change, who will do it and by when. Decide what would show that the change worked. Fewer repeat incidents and less time lost by users would tell you more than another green response-time score.

At the next review, check that evidence. If the problem is still there, work out what needs to change again. Giving the same issue a new date every month is a fairly generous definition of progress.

Procurement brings the commercial knowledge into this. Check that the business is receiving the service it is paying for, that charges reflect the agreement, and that proposed changes have an understood cost and benefit before anyone commits to them. If the business now needs something different, help it work through the options with the supplier while there is time to make a sensible decision.

And when the service is working well, there is still a conversation worth having. The supplier may see avoidable demand, repeated manual work or a better way to deliver the service. Pick an improvement worth trying, agree how you'll judge it, and follow through. That is where the relationship can start producing value nobody captured in the original negotiation.

This is the standard I'd want from procurement contract management: the business gets what it bought, problems lead to improvements, and the next commercial decision is made with evidence. Procurement stays close enough to help the deal work and improve, with a contract owner who has the time, information and support to do their part.

The member contract-ownership guide has an ownership charter, a decision-rights record and a handover acceptance check to work through with the person taking over.

Daniel