Conducting Procurements

Many times project managers must purchase goods or services to complete some or all of the work of the project. Sometimes the entire project is completed on contract. The Conduct Procurements process is concerned with obtaining responses to bids and proposals from potential vendors, selecting a vendor, and awarding the contract.

This process has several inputs:

• Project management plan (procurement management plan)
• Source selection criteria
• Qualified seller list
• Seller proposals
• Project documents
• Make-or-buy decisions
• Teaming agreements
• Organizational process assets

I’ve talked about most of these inputs in previous chapters. Procurement documents include requests for proposals (RFPs), requests for information (RFIs), requests for quotations (RFQs), and so on. The responses to those proposals become inputs to this process. Source selection criteria was defined in the Plan Procurements process that we talked about in Chapter 7, “Planning Project Resources.” In the tools and techniques section for this process, we’ll talk more about how seller proposals are evaluated.