Managing Contractors

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Outsourcing   Resource Management   Talent Management  

Managing contractors can be a very different challenge than managing employees, even matrixed employees. When it comes to bringing contractors on board to work on a project or inside an organization, the manager should be prepared to not just manage their work, but also their contract and several other factors that go into how well a job they will do for the organization.

Managing contractors can be challenging, but at the end of the day everyone should be focused on finishing the project and the scope of work assigned to them. It is the task of the project manager to integrate the entire team into the project work, while the organizational leader's responsibility is to ensure that the proper resources are available for the project—whether those resources be internal or external.

Define the Work Product
One of the first steps is to define the work product for the contractors. It should be clear to everyone involved what the contractors should be doing on the project and in the organization. Ideally, this would be stipulated in the contract or agreement that is created when the contractor is hired, but oftentimes everything is not known about what they will need to be doing.

In that case, it is important to make sure that the agreement is updated as work is being discovered. There should never be a question about what work product the contractor is …

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