Outsourcing Procurement Plan
This is a practical guide to building a procurement plan for an outsourcing project — what will be bought, how and from whom, adapted to the realities of outsourcing a function to an external provider.
What a Procurement Plan is
A procurement plan is what will be bought, how and from whom. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Procurement Management. On an outsourcing project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for an Outsourcing project
Outsourcing projects live or die on outsourcing a function to an external provider. A well-built procurement plan gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how outsourcing projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What to procure
- Contract types
- Selection criteria
- Timeline and SLAs
Outsourcing-specific considerations
Tailor the procurement plan to the risks that most often derail outsourcing projects:
- Knowledge transfer
- Service-level definition
- People impact
Example
On a real outsourcing project, the procurement plan would be shaped by outsourcing a function to an external provider. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — knowledge transfer, service-level definition, people impact — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.