- As a project manager you'll often need to procure goods or services from external suppliers to satisfy your project's needs. Procurement itself might seem a little confusing though as you'll need to know how contracts work and how to select and manage external suppliers. In this video will help you go into a procurement process with confidence by covering procurement strategy. The APM defined procurement strategy as the high level approach for securing the goods and services required from external suppliers to satisfy the project, program or portfolio needs. And it defines the way that you should always look to acquire goods and services. The strategy acts as a bridge between the projects needs, but also takes into account any organizational constraints, like ethical procurement policies for instance. It might also include things like how much risk is involved by using different kinds of suppliers, and what type of relationship is expected between the organization and the suppliers. Managing procurement properly will be key to your project success. And there are six things to keep in mind to help you do so. The very first is the make or buy decision. You need to decide if you build what you need yourself as an organization or a project team, or if it will be more cost, time and quality effective to have a supplier build it. This decision is the gatekeeper to procurement and needs to be thought through carefully. Next, the provider contractor arrangement which is also known as a market survey. This is the process you need to go through to see which suppliers exist in the market, what the difference between the offerings are, and generally just finding the best solution for your project. While you're finding the best fit for your project in the market, you'll also need to think about provider contractor relationships, and specifically whether you need to use a single provider to deliver the requirement, or if you want multiple contractors delivering different parts of the requirement in sequence. Of course, this part of the process is also to select the provider or contractor you will use, based on specific criteria you've identified up front. Once you've chosen a provider, you need to put together the conditions and form the contract, which is normally just an outline of the standard terms and conditions that will be applied to their work, and make sure that all parties are happy with these. Last up you need to think about the different ways you can reimburse the supplier, whether it be fixed price or cost reimbursable plus fee. And that's it for this video. Procurement is a big topic, and there are a few other parts to it we haven't dealt with in this video, but having a strong procurement strategies is one of the ways you can make sure that you are in control of any procurement that's essential for your project success.