Effective Contract Management

What is contract management?

This Cabinet Office note explains what good contract management looks like once you have appointed a supplier. In plain terms, contract management is the work you and your commercial colleagues do to make sure the service you have bought is delivered on time, to the agreed quality and for the agreed price. The guide warns that if you leave a contract to run itself it will almost certainly lose value through missed deadlines, creeping costs or unmet promises.

Breaking down contract management

The document breaks the task into three broad phases. First comes mobilisation: the short window between award and go live when you and the supplier agree who will do what, when data will be handed over and how performance will be measured. For a planning team buying new case management or plan making software that means agreeing how the supplier will migrate existing applications, train officers and test integrations before the system switches on. The second phase is day-to-day service delivery and relationship management. Here the guide stresses regular meetings, clear reporting and swift escalation when things slip; think of it as the digital equivalent of a weekly site visit on a construction project. The final phase is preparing for contract expiry or exit. You should plan early for how data will be returned, how performance will be reviewed and how a replacement service will be procured, so that the planning service is never left without a working system.

Key ingredients for successful contract management in planning

Throughout, the note emphasises the need for accurate recordkeeping, sensible change control and active risk management. Most local planning authorities will not have the capacity to run all of this alone, so the key message is to involve your procurement or legal team from day one, agree on a single contract manager, and keep an eye on performance as closely as you would monitor delivery of a local plan milestone. If you want the detailed checklists and professional standards, the full Cabinet Office guidance sits behind this summary, but the principles above will steer any planning service towards a well-run contract.