When you work with a vendor, customization shouldn’t stop at your project’s workflow and deliverables. Funding and timelines are intrinsically connected and, often, the project’s success will be determined by the duration of work and how it’s budgeted.
You’ve just filled out a questionnaire for your upcoming project. You know it’s going to be for a lot of work – how will it get done? How long will it take to complete? Will it be expensive? Is outsourcing the right decision? Can others perform the work more efficiently?
When you receive your quote, there will be several things to bear in mind.
Contract Duration
Projects don’t have to be linear. We think of them as having a starting point and an ending point with few deviations between those stages. However, many projects benefit from the phased approach.
Pilot Projects
These short-form contracts provide an opportunity to work out complicated steps in production and delivery workflows and give everyone a taste of how a larger project would be conducted. A section of the work is portioned off to test things out, either with a set volume of materials to process or a cost ceiling. When that work is completed, the library reviews the results. From there, a future project’s parameters can be adjusted. This also provides evidence to acquire funding down the road, either through a grant or budget petitions.
Multi-Year
Powering through a large-scale project in a single go isn’t always feasible; they can require a lot of moving parts on the library’s side and coming up with funding to support them straight through is more complicated than sectioning out the work to be done over the course of a few years. Multi-year projects are arranged in such a way that clear sections of work are executed within an annual budget year-to-year; pre-planning makes it easier to put down and pick up the work without making a mess, and this workflow meters the project out to the demands of available funding.
Do-Not-Exceed
Contracts typically look at how much work there is to be completed and provide a price for that work. However, you can flip this: contracts can establish a range of prices for work that may be done and set a spending cap. This is great for libraries that don’t know how much work they will have to send in a year or who only know what the maximum spend will be. We often see this format used in conjunction with world language cataloging: a library or consortia may know that they’ll have original-level Korean monographs to catalog each year, but no idea as to how many. Not a problem! A “do not-exceed” type contract is great for this sort of situation.
Competition
When you are evaluating outsourcing, reach out to numerous vendors about workflows and quotes. It’s more than reasonable – it’s good practice! While many may offer the services you’re looking for and have commensurate promises, here are a few policies to ask about:
- Communicating Project Updates: Does your vendor provide updates about how the project is proceeding and, if so, how often? Does this include reporting?
- Payment Terms and Negotiation: Every vendor will have a standard set of terms and conditions. These often relate to the length of time in which prices are eligible, down payments, etc. Be sure to review these and see how they align with your institution’s own terms; if there are conflicts, communicate these to your vendor and see how willing they are to be flexible.
- Quality Assurance: Every vendor should be checking the quality of their work as it’s being completed. Ask for details regarding quality assurance workflows as well as how the vendor will fix work – if they will – should errors be discovered once the project is complete. For example, at Backstage, we have a life-time guarantee.
- Customer Reviews: Requesting referrals is a great way to hear about other librarians’ experiences with similar projects.
Customization
Contracts are meant to be discussed, tweaked, edited, and perfected. The first quote you receive from a vendor is meant to present the options and give the conversation a starting point, but there is no obligation to accept it in its first iteration. It may be that you want to add or remove sections; with discussion, you may find adjusting the proposed workflow would better fit your available staffing and funding.
Vendors function as partners to your processes. Partners collaborate and find the best route forward through obstacles.
If you’d like to talk to us about an upcoming project, or even just learn more about the contracting process with Backstage, call us at 1.800.288.1265 or send an email to info@bslw.com.
