Last time we looked at the different times in a contract where you would be scheduling payments. Today, I wanted to write a bit about the different types of payment you could factor into your work with vendors to give you some variety with how you structure payments.
Before we start, make sure to discuss any payment plans with your procurement and finance teams, so you don’t end up committing your company to something that you really shouldn’t! In my experience, contracting and procurement are really outside a project manager’s pay grade – organisations generally want the specialists involved, and most project managers would not have authority to sign contracts.
However, it’s worth knowing about the different payment options out there, so you can mention them in conversations with the right people if they are relevant to how you think your project would be best served.
Here are some options to consider for your next project procurement activity.
1. Uptime/availability payments
This is something to build into service level agreements. In the past, my projects have needed to set up SLAs, and uptime payments were built into those.
In essence, vendors get an incentive payment for keeping the service available instead of penalty clauses for downtime.
You could use this principle to build in payments for services or support being available, and you could have various thresholds that trigger different payments. Or you could put penalty clauses in for downtime, but that’s not so good for relationship building. The management at my last company was very much against punitive clauses as they believed it did not incentivise a partnership relationship and was too much centred on blame.
If you do put these clauses in your contracts, make sure you also document how you claim the payments. For example, for uptime incentives, if I remember rightly, we had to claim them, and sometimes for the value offered, it wasn’t really worth the admin… so think that through before you write them into contracts.
2. Performance payments
I haven’t used these personally in projects, but I believe they are common in construction (are they? Let me know in the comments).
This would be a payment related to hitting a particular performance threshold, perhaps delivering early on a particular milestone, or reaching some kind of target. When we pay for services, there are often performance-based payments built into the schedule. You’ll have seen these, too if you do any kind of online transaction processing. For example, I signed up for a service linked to my personal website that allows me to have up to 10k of transactions per month at a flat rate fee, and then if I go over that, the next tier of payment-based payments kick in. Payment is based on how many transactions you put through the system.
That could be relevant for your project if you are launching a service where volume or number of transactions or units processed would trigger an additional payment or an additional discount.
3. Incentives
You could find any number of ways to incentivise vendors. For example:
- Productivity savings
- Process improvements
- Staff savings
- Time per transaction saving
- Decrease in number of complaints or increase in staff satisfaction as measured by a survey
In addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned above. Anything that reduces overall cost of the service or product could be passed on to the client (your project), and there could be an incentive payment linked to that – ideally something that is beneficial to you both, not just cost-cutting for cost-cutting’s sake.
Have you used any of these payment methods on your projects? Let us know in the comments!
