All contracts have to be carefully managed. This is particularly true when quality, price, and time sensitivity are important. Educators need to think about how they are going to manage and must give time and attention to this.
Educators Get Separated from Suppliers
Once a contract has been drawn up, questions of project management might well get separated from questions of management of the educational programme. The contractor may do some project management (or all of it), an administrative unit in the educator's organisation or the election authority may take over the contract.
So the relationship to the education programme can attenuate, and it can easily happen that those who commissioned the work stop assessing it and managing it closely.
When educational capacity is limited, it is even more likely that a contractor will take on major responsibility for the project.
The consequence of this is that all the information available about the project, all its assessment and all the performance criteria shift their locus from the contractor, who is paying the bills, to the supplier, and who is submitting bills. This may be considered a licence to print money.
Project Management Capacity
An education team, or an election authority, which commissions goods and services, whether on a grand scale or on a more limited scale, needs to ensure it has the capacity to manage these contracts in detail. Project management skills, regular meetings, review of targets and of costs, and consideration of variances in costing, supply quality, and project details need to be considered jointly by the contractor and the supplier.
This is partially a matter of trust, and there could be an argument that trustworthy suppliers who are working to a set of agreements can manage themselves. But it is also a matter of knowledge and power.
A suppliers left to its own devices, conducting the project, without oversight, can become the experts. This leads to two problems. The first is the problem of future contracts - the expert is in an advantageous position in regard to future projects and can set the price if there is no alternative way of getting the job done. The second is the problem of staff capacity. The expert supplier is never matched by a knowledgeable contractor leaving them always able to assert their authority.
A Service in the Short Term
Project management resources could, in the short term, be resolved by buying in these services separately and independently of general goods and services. Often, this is done by new election authorities and organisations. However, those who intend to commission goods and services on a regular basis need to build up this capacity in house.
In-house capacity can be built into contracts, so a project management team has to leave behind its expertise by doing training and helping set up indigenous systems.
