Project Management: Foundations to Practice · Procurement and Contract Management
Contract Administration and Closure
Signing a contract is the beginning of the vendor relationship's real work, not its conclusion. This chapter covers what active administration requires and why closure deserves its own deliberate process.
Once a contract is signed, contract administration involves monitoring the vendor's performance against agreed terms, managing any change requests through a formal process similar to internal scope control, and maintaining documentation that would support either party in the event of a dispute, treating the contract as a living agreement to be actively managed rather than a document to be filed away once signatures are collected [1].
Key Takeaways
- Contract administration is active and ongoing: monitoring performance, managing change requests, and maintaining dispute-ready documentation.
- Contract closure includes verifying deliverable acceptance, resolving outstanding claims, and documenting vendor-specific lessons learned.
- Treating signature as the finish line lets performance issues surface too late to correct within the current engagement.
- Vendor-specific lessons learned, captured at closure, build organizational memory that outlasts the individuals who managed the engagement.