When it comes to executing capital construction projects, the monthly contractor performance evaluation report is one of the important communications that the project management team must ensure that it is shared in the required form and format. The contractor’s performance will be evaluated against the five key areas being the Schedule, Cost, Quality, Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) and Project Management Capabilities. Under each key area, there will be a number of criteria that each contractor performance will be evaluated against.
On monthly basis, those performance criteria will be reviewed and assessed as whether the contractor’s achieved performance was “Action Required” to change the lack of performance, “Attention Required” to improve performance, current performance “Meets Requirement”, “Valued Performance” and “Outstanding Performance”. Pre-defined measures will be set for those criteria to determine the achieved performance score for carrying out the criteria scope of activities.
For example, for the criteria “Volume of noncomplying works and timely response to quality related NCR’s & SWI’s.” which is part Quality, a 5-point performance score will be considered for “Outstanding Performance or 5” if 10 Marks If 95-100 % of received NCRs and SWIs are closed during the elapsed month. The “Valued Performance or 4” for 94% to 85% of received NCRs/SWIs are closed during the elapsed month, “Meets Requirement or 3” for 84% to 75% of received NCRs/SWIs are closed during the elapsed month, “Attention Required or 2” for 74% to 65% of received NCRs/SWIs are closed during the elapsed month and “Action Required or 0” for less than 65% of received NCRs/SWIs are closed during the elapsed month. A similar approach will be followed for evaluating the performance achieved for other criteria of the Schedule, Cost, Quality, Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) and Project Management Capabilities areas.
To ensure unbiased evaluation of the contractor’s performance, the scoring of the criteria will be done three project team members. The first will be the discipline manager, for example for the Schedule area, the evaluation will be done by the planning manager where as for Quality it will be the Quality Manager. The second evaluation will be done by the construction manager while the third will be the project manager. The weight of those evaluations to overall evaluation score might differ. For example, the weight for the discipline manager and construction manager could be 30% where as for the project manager it will be the balance 40%.
The contractors’ performance evaluation will be consolidated for all projects delivered by the project owner to provide senior stakeholders with an overall dashboard that displays the performance of each contractor awarded a construction contract. The report will enable also to view the performance of each specific contractor on all projects that the contractor is involved with.
Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb, all business processes that a contractor could be involved with will be managed. This will provide the information needed to evaluate the performance of each contractor. In addition, PMWeb will be used to create the template for the Contractor Performance Evaluation. The template will include the tables for each key area with the performance evaluation criteria that relates to each. This will enable assigning access permission rights for each key area table. In addition, the template will have a field to identify the reviewer who have completed the performance evaluation. The name of the reviewers will be picked from PMWeb companies directory.
To provide complete transparency on contractor’s performance evaluation as well as transactions of other business processes managed in PMWeb, all supportive documents need to be attached to each record. PMWeb attachment tab in those templates will be used to attach all those supportive documents. It is also highly recommended to add comments to each attached document to provide better understanding of what was the document for. The attachment tab also allows the user to link other records for business processes implemented in PMWeb as well as associate URL hyperlinks with websites or documents that are not stored in PMWeb document management repository.
All those supportive documents need also to be uploaded into PMWeb document management repository so they can be stored and used. Those documents could be uploaded into folders or subfolders so they are better organized and secured. PMWeb allows setting access rights to each folder to identify the users who have access rights to view documents stored in a folder. In addition, PMWeb allows setting notifications for individuals to receive emails when new documents are uploaded or existing documents were downloaded or deleted.
To enforce accountability for the contractor’s performance evaluation, PMWeb workflow module will be used to create a workflow to formalize the review and approval tasks of this business process. The workflow will map the sequence of the review and approval tasks along with the role or user assigned to the task, duration allotted for the tasks, rules for returning or resubmitting a document and available for each task.
When a contractor’s performance evaluation is initiated, the workflow tab available on the evaluation template will capture the planned review and approve workflow tasks for each transaction as well as the actual history of those review and approval tasks. PMWeb will capture the actual action data and time, done by who, action taken, comments made and whether team input was requested.
The data extracted from the contractor’s performance evaluation business process will become the basis for monitoring, evaluating and reporting the contractors’ performance for each project. The report will include a map visual that to display all projects managed by the organization. The icon for each project could be have different colors to identify the type of project and the size of the icon could be used to reflect the performance scoring achieved by the contractor. The report reader can filter the performance data by each contractor name to have better understanding of overall performance of each contractor working with the project owner.
About the Author
Bassam Samman, PMP, PSP, EVP, GPM is a Senior Project Management Consultant with 40-year service record providing project management, project controls services and project management information system to over than 200 projects with a total value in excess of US $100 Billion. Those projects included Commercial, Residential, Education and Healthcare Buildings and Infrastructure, Entertainment, Hospitality and shopping malls, Oil and Gas Plants and Refineries, Telecommunication and Information Technology projects. He is thoroughly experienced in complete project management including project management control systems, computerized project control software, claims analysis/prevention, risk analysis/management (contingency planning), design, supervision, training and business development.
Bassam is a frequent speaker in topics relating to Project Management, Strategic Project Management and Project Management Personal Skills. Over the past 40 years he has lectured at more than 350 events and courses at different locations in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and South America. He has written more than 500 articles on project management and project management information systems that were featured in international and regional magazines and newspapers. He is a co-founder of the Project Management Institute- Arabian Gulf Chapter (PMI-AGC) and has served on its board of directors for more than 6 years. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute (PMI), a certified Planning and Scheduling Professional (PSP) and Earned Value Professional (EVP) from the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE) and Green Project Management (GPM).
Bassam holds a Masters in Engineering Administration (Construction Management) with Faculty Commendation, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA, Bachelor in Civil Engineering – Kuwait University, Kuwait and has attended many executive management programs at Harvard Business School, Boston, USA and London Business School, London, UK.