Contract Monitoring

WE HAVE RECENTLY PUBLISHED A TECHNICAL BOOK DESIGNED TO IMPROVE YOUR CONTRACT MONITORING.  The following provides an indication of its content -

We adopt a very lateral and creative thinking approach to monitoring.  The following is intended to provide a flavour, but please do not hesitate to contact us if you require any further information.

Monitor the key criteria.

At the time of letting the contract(s), the issues that were important to the Council/Housing Association were identified and assessed as part of the evaluation process.  As the evaluation considered price and quality, it makes sense to adopt a monitoring regime that reflects the same. In other words, if price and quality were important enough to be evaluated, they must be important enough to be monitored.

Inspect Record Analyse and Act. (IRAA)

It is also important to use the Inspect, Record, Analyse, and Act philosophy.

There should be no inspection without a record.  There should be no record without analysis and there should be no analysis without action.  If any of the four are not going to be done then there is no point in doing any of them.

The timeframe is important too.  At the risk of stating the obvious, acting on something that was inspected two years ago would be totally ineffective. There should be as little time as possible between the four stages.

Random testing of any project/system/organisation must also be set up to ensure that it is complying with this common sense approach and not wasting taxpayers' money by undertaking monitoring which does not lead to action and continuous improvement.  An external party should undertake this random testing of the system.  (This could still be from inside your own organistion, but from a different section).

Any time and money spent on monitoring must lead to an improvement in the Service. No contract these days should be written on a status quo basis.  Follow the IRAA philosophy and improvement is inevitable as long as the correct action is taken.