Procurement Performance Reviews

Procurement technique · See it on the map

Guide only — Judging a seller's performance is a judgment call.

Checking, at regular intervals, how a live contract is actually performing against its terms.

When to use it

On any agreement that runs long enough to have a meaningful trajectory: multi-month retainers, phased deliverables, or any contract where cost or schedule performance could drift gradually rather than fail all at once. Reviewing at fixed intervals catches drift a single end-of-contract check would miss.

When to avoid it

For a short, single-deliverable engagement there usually isn't enough runway for a periodic review to add anything a straightforward acceptance check at completion wouldn't already catch — don't build a review cadence around a contract that will be finished before the second review would happen.

Steps

1. Set the review interval when the agreement starts, matched to how long the agreement runs — monthly for a year-long retainer, not for a six-week project.
2. At each review, compare actual cost, schedule, and delivered scope against the agreement's terms — not against a general sense of how things are going.
3. Flag drift while it's still small: a vendor running consistently late or consistently over budget is a pattern worth raising at the second occurrence, not the fifth.
4. Record the review outcome against the agreement so a pattern across reviews is visible, not just each review's isolated snapshot.

What it produces

• A dated record of the agreement's cost, schedule and scope performance at each review point

Common pitfalls

• Only reviewing at the contract's natural milestones, which are often exactly when the vendor has something to show — missing the drift that happens between them.
• Treating a single bad review as decisive, or a single good one as clearing every earlier concern, instead of reading the trend across several reviews.
• Running a heavy review process on a short contract that will be over before a second data point exists.

Worked example

A twelve-month IT support retainer is reviewed monthly against its service-level terms. The first two reviews look fine individually, but by the third, response times have crept from the contracted four hours to just over six each month — a trend invisible from any single review, but obvious once the three are read together, prompting a conversation with the vendor well before the pattern became a contractual breach.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §12.3.2

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.