Use Active Contract Management: Getting Started

How to Get Started

1. Determine which existing or upcoming contract or grant is a good candidate for ACM. Contracts that extend over multiple months, provide services to the community, build repeatable processes or involve multiple work streams tend to provide more opportunities for adjustment than contracts purchasing a piece of equipment, access to a database, or training course.

2. Incorporate information and any requirements about ACM into the RFP. Provide information sessions, or other technical assistance, to allow respondents to address any questions up front. This might include reporting cadence, required participants, and roles and responsibilities of the agency and the contractor or grantee. Make sure that ACM related activities will be allowable contract expenses. Download this template for ACM language to include in your grant or contract.

3. Collaborate with the procurement and contract management/compliance functions of the agency so they are aware that ACM will be used and have the opportunity to provide insight on how best to rapidly implement changes to contract scope or performance that may be required as a result of lessons learned through ACM.

4. Invest early in relationship building with the contractor or grantee. This includes acknowledging imbalances of power that exist between funder and funded organization, encouraging proactive and open dialogue, and establishing a shared approach that is focused on jointly understanding and addressing issues instead of punitive performance compliance.

5. Develop an agreed upon set of objectives as well as leading and lagging indicators. Use this to inform the development of a performance improvement roadmap. See Harvard Government Performance Lab’s Six Tools for Implementing Active Contract Management for useful worksheets. Make sure to consider how the equity of outcomes will be assessed using the chosen indicators, keeping in mind that understanding differentiated outcomes may require disaggregation data.

6. Establish the mechanism to collect, share and analyze the data. This can include real time dashboards, quarterly reports or other formats. Information should be easily digestible yet provide enough detail to allow for dialogue and decision making.

7. Operationalize your ongoing checkpoints, leaving space for continuous improvement along the way. This may include the addition of new data sets and the adjustment of data collection and reporting mechanisms, as well as changes to processes or policies.