Subtitles of the Movie

Within your Work Files you will find a knowledge-area specific assessment document, similar to the assessment we reviewed earlier in this course on project communications management and project risk management. In this movie, we'll review the procurement-related assessment. If you haven't gone through this exercise yet, I highly suggest doing so before reviewing this movie. The assessment covers a few high-level items of the knowledge area including the overall purpose of the knowledge area, the processes that make up that knowledge area, the purpose of each individual process and the primary outputs generated within each process. In regards to a high-level understanding of the knowledge area, the purpose is to purchase or acquire the products, services or results needed from outside the project team to perform the work. As you may recall from the knowledge area overview movies, the Procurement Knowledge Area is concerned with contract management and change control and the administration of contracts issued externally. We also lightly touched on the three categories of procurement, which were major complexity, minor complexity and routine purchases. It's for these complex types of procurement that the contract management plan will be essential. There are only six processes within the Procurement Management Knowledge Area: plan purchases and acquisitions, plan contracting, request seller responses, select sellers, contract administration and contract closure. The assessment also tests your knowledge of the process group that each process belongs to. In this case, plan purchases and acquisitions and also plan contracting both belong to the planning process group. Request seller responses belongs to the executing process group, as does select sellers. Contract administration belongs to the monitoring and controlling process group. And contract closure naturally belongs to the closing process group. Let's review the purpose of these six processes. The purpose of the plan purchases and acquisitions process is to determine what to purchase or acquire and when and how. Next is plan contracting, which documents the products, services and results requirements and identifies potential sellers. The purpose of request seller responses is to obtain information, quotes, bids, offers or proposals from potential sellers as appropriate. Notice that the title of the process can be an obvious clue into the purpose of the process. Next is select sellers, which reviews offers from potential sellers, choosing among the sellers and negotiating a written contract with each seller. The next process, contract administration, has a hefty purpose and that is to manage the contract and relationship between the buyer and seller, review and document how sellers are performing to establish corrective actions and provide a basis for future relationships with the seller, manage contract-related changes and manage the contractual relationship with outside buyers of the project. When you pick the process apart, it isn't as daunting as when we're first reviewing what occurs within it. And lastly, contract closure, whose purpose is to complete and settle each contract including the resolution of open items and closing each contract applicable to the project. Knowing the key outputs of each process is a great benefit and allows you an important window into the processes. If you know what the process is aiming to generate, you can piece together what information is needed to generate these results and what tools and techniques allow you to utilize the inputs. This is a great exercise to go through and it helps you to avoid feeling as though you need to memorize inputs and tools and techniques for the exam. Key outputs of the plan purchases and acquisitions process include the procurement management plan, contract statement of work and make or buy decisions. Key outputs of the plan contracting process are the procurement documents and evaluation criteria. You may also have noted updates to the contract statement of work. Under request seller responses, we have qualified sellers list, procurement document package and proposals from potential sellers. You may also have included updates to the procurement management plan and requested changes. Key outputs generated from the select sellers process include selected sellers, contract, contract management plan and the resource availability. Under contract administration, we have contract documentation, requested changes and recommended corrective actions and if you were very thorough in noting the outputs, you may have also included updates to the organizational process assets and updates to the project management plan. And lastly we have close contracts under the contract closure process. This process also includes updates to the organization process assets. And that wraps up the Project Procurement Management Knowledge Area assessment review. Now that you've gauged where you are in terms of procurement, I suggest going through the individual process movies and taking the assessment exercise once again after going through these movies to compare how much more information you've retained. That concludes this movie and in the next section we'll begin a review of the individual procurement-related processes.