8.1: Introduction

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Donald Coffelt and Chris Hendrickson
Carnegie Mellon University via Donald Coffelt and Chris Hendrickson

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Contract and workflow management are often major time commitments for infrastructure managers. Contract management is the process of ordering and monitoring outside organizations to do some work required for infrastructure management. Workflow management is the process of organizing and scheduling tasks related to infrastructure management. The extent to which tasks are contracted out will depend upon the internal resources available for infrastructure management.

As with many processes, information technology aids are available and useful for both contract and workflow management. As tasks are defined, they can be logged into a database, monitored and progress recorded. Contract documents and records are quite likely to be kept digitally by both the principal and the contractor. Either specialized or general purpose software can be used for these purposes.

Of course, contract and workflow management is not limited to the domain of infrastructure management. Large firms such as Amazon have very sophisticated financial, inventory and order tracking software. The transportation provider firm Uber has large numbers of contractor drivers as well as suppliers. Similarly, hospitals have systems in place for contracting and workflow management. We will focus on contracting and workflow management for infrastructure, although the processes are similar for other applications (Monczka et. al 2015; Van Der Aalst and Kees, 2004).