Contract Progress Review Meetings with Contractor

Contract progress review meetings with the contractor are scheduled contract-administration meetings. In them, the buyer's contract and technical representatives review how the contractor is performing against the contract. The agenda covers deliverables, milestones, schedule, risks, issues and the actions each party must take.

The term is descriptive rather than a fixed abbreviation. NATO procurement guidance describes periodic meetings between the contract manager, the Authorised Technical Representative and the Procurement Officer during contract performance. These meetings are held as needed and documented in signed minutes. The practice is most visible on complex defence, information-technology and systems-development contracts.

What the meetings cover

A progress review looks at the contractor's work to date measured against the contract. Typical agenda items are completed work, milestones, schedule status, open risks and issues, and outstanding actions. NATO solicitation examples also require the contractor to report on matters that need action from the purchaser.

NATO's procurement manual recommends that a solicitation set out the frequency, participants and documentation requirements for performance-evaluation meetings. A bidder can therefore expect these details in the solicitation documents rather than leaving them to be agreed later. The manual is published at nato.int.

Related NATO terms: progress meetings, PPMs and PRMs

NATO solicitations use several names for the same activity.

• Progress meeting: a meeting to review the contractor's progress. A NATO Joint Warfare Centre solicitation requires the contractor to attend at the frequency the contract specifies, and states that the COTR and the Contracting Officer will normally attend. See the JWC solicitation annex.
• Project Progress Meeting (PPM): a recurring meeting on completed work, milestones, schedule, risks, issues and outstanding actions.
• Project Review Meeting (PRM): a formal review that can be combined with design reviews, testing or acceptance milestones such as a Preliminary Design Review, Critical Design Review or factory acceptance test.
• COTR: Contracting Officer's Technical Representative, the technical contact named in NATO solicitations.

Reports and minutes

Documentation is part of the meeting cycle. A NATO procurement example requires monthly progress reports covering tasks, deliverables, milestones, completed and planned activities, risks, issues and matters requiring NATO action. The example is in NATO ACT solicitation rfp026090.

In one NATO project-progress-meeting clause, the contractor submits a project-highlight report before each meeting and prepares the minutes afterward. The minutes become final once the parties' project managers accept them. NATO's sample language also requires signed minutes and lets the contractor record any disagreement with the minutes within a set period.

Use in Canadian federal contracting

In Canada, progress review is treated as a contract-administration activity rather than a single standard clause. Library and Archives Canada's guidance on acquisition services lists attending progress review meetings among contract-administration activities, next to monitoring and interacting with suppliers. It also refers to keeping minutes of meetings with contractors. The guidance is on canada.ca.

National Defence reporting gives a defence example. Monthly System Engineering and Integrated Logistics Support Technical Review Meetings examine contractor design reviews, validate technical requirements leading to a Final Design Acceptance milestone, and review supportability issues from systems integration or logistics engineering. See the DND status report on transformational major capital projects.

What it means for a supplier

Your obligations come from the statement of work, contract data requirements, meeting clause and schedule in the solicitation and resulting contract. Before bidding, check each of these:

• How often meetings are held and where.
• Who must attend for the contractor and for the buyer.
• Which reports are due before a meeting, and their deadlines.
• Who prepares the minutes, and how they are accepted or disputed.
• Whether meetings are tied to milestone reviews or acceptance events.

Build meeting attendance, reporting effort and travel into your pricing and staffing plan. Canadian suppliers on NATO procurements can meet these requirements directly in the solicitation.