Should purchasing remain involved in the process once contract terms have been negotiated?
All too often, misunderstandings arise during the course of the contract that could have been resolved had a contract specialist reminded the parties of the implications of a seemingly innocuous change. The trick, of course, is how to select the contracts to watch and those that can (relatively) safely be left in the hands of others. The only certainty is that whatever you do, you won’t get it right every time. It’s well worth thinking through how you want these judgments to be made and setting up some kind of procedural framework so that everyone in the company knows the score. If the accepted practice is that the users in department A do contract management themselves, but those in department B want you to chair every progress meeting, it is still important to work out if this is the best way to do things. Lots of expensive management time rightly goes into setting up contracts, but persuading senior management to allocate adequate support to professional contract management is diffi
