Following up from our White Paper 2021-09 ‘Why It Is Important to Distinguish Contracting Strategy and Commercial Approaches’, we share our new White Paper 2021-10 ‘How to Map a Project Contractual Strategy’ an effective way to map a project contracting strategy. In particular, this technique allows to readily identify scope gaps while showing which interfaces need to be dealt with.

A project contracting strategy – i.e. how the scope is split between entities and contractors, is an essential element of project maturity and project execution. Specific aspects include making sure the entire project execution scope is effectively covered by the strategy and identifying the key interfaces that will have to be managed by the project team.

Too many projects start with a contracting strategy that is not comprehensive or underestimate the amount of coordination work that will have to be carried out by project management.

We have found that the contracting strategy is not often represented in a way that provides an easy overview. We propose a fairly simple way of representing such a contracting strategy, which is a table showing horizontally the scope breakdown (as per the Product Breakdown Structure) and vertically the various project phases. Our new White Paper 2021-10 ‘How to Map a Project Contractual Strategy’ provides a few examples.

Mapping the project contracting strategy is a very effective way to make visible the issues of that strategy. It is a technique we often use in our consulting interventions and project reviews since weaknesses of the contracting strategy often become self-evident when the exercise is performed. Try it out on your project!

If you can’t access the link to the white paper, copy and paste the following link in your browser: https://www.projectvaluedelivery.com/_library/2021-10_how_to_map_project_contractual_strategy_v1.pdf