Behind this deliberately blunt title lies a debate that keeps coming back, in organisations as much as in the profession: is contract management a support function or an operational one? The question looks legitimate at first sight, but it is above all badly framed, and that framing makes many organisations miss what really defines our profession, and what makes its real value.
A divide that does not survive contact with practice
Most organisations draw a line between two categories of function. On one side, the operational functions: those that produce, deliver and execute. On the other, the support functions: those that assist, equip and make the first group's work easier. This reading grid, inherited from classic organisational models, works reasonably well for most jobs (and even then, project buyers and project controllers, among others, could legitimately ask themselves the same question). Applied to contract management, this binary distinction very quickly shows its limits.
Calling contract management a support function means, among other things, reducing it to a cost centre. Yet operational, demanding contract management does not merely support a project: it directly helps protect and generate margin. When a contract manager builds a well-founded claim, secures a contractual scope or identifies a negotiating lever, they produce measurable value. Filing them under support functions denies that contribution.
But beyond the accounting question, and once egos have been filed away, it is above all a question of posture. A support function, as organisations understand it, is a resource you call on when you need it and set aside the rest of the time. It is a toolbox at the project director's disposal. An ambitious practice of contract management cannot work that way. To be strategic, to be proactive, the contract manager must be in the loop at all times, not summoned occasionally when a problem arises.
To add some nuance, it is fair to recognise that in a so-called “portfolio” contract management model, where a contract manager (often a junior one) works across several projects without being dedicated to any of them, the support logic makes sense: the project director draws on a shared contract management capability and calls on it as needs arise. As soon as contract management is practised on a “dedicated” basis on a project, however, the positioning changes radically. The dedicated contract manager is not a tool. They are a co-pilot, a partner, a sparring partner to the project director. And that positioning cannot be decreed: it is earned and built through the value delivered day after day, through the relevance of the alerts raised, through the quality of the interventions across the contract lifecycle (and the project).
Contract management is an interface function by nature
The contract manager works at the junction between disciplines. They interface with procurement, legal, project management, engineering, operations, sometimes executive management (on this subject, see our article on processes and interfaces). But what makes them distinctive is not simply being in touch with these various counterparts (a project manager is just as much so); it is the reading grid they bring to each of these interfaces: that of the contract applied to operations.
The contract manager is the only player who reads the contract and the operation at the same time. They do not give legal advice, a matter reserved for the experts in the field, in-house counsel and solicitors; they apply law and contractual commitments to operational realities. It is this dual reading that makes them the interface player par excellence: they translate contractual issues into operational terms for the project teams, and they translate realities on the ground into contractual terms to secure the company's positions.
This interface function can be illustrated through two complementary expectations. The first is the constant surveillance of project execution: making sure, day after day, that operations stay aligned with the contract. To illustrate that first expectation, here is a simple but revealing example: the content of a monthly report, how often it is delivered, and in what form. Without a contract manager, the project director risks either issuing the report they are used to producing rather than the one the contract provides for, or bowing to client demands when nothing in the contract obliges them to. These slippages, trivial in appearance, can have significant long-term consequences. The contract manager is the one who spots them and puts things back on track.
The second expectation is one of occasional orchestration, and one of its most emblematic examples is claims management. Building a claim is not about writing a letter (as we often repeat, the contract manager is not a scribe). The contract manager's role is above all to bring together the right internal skills (technical, planning, financial, and so on) to obtain the right information, at the right time, with the right level of granularity. It is then about structuring the whole around a rigorous three-part logic: the origin of the triggering event, the contractual basis to be relied on, and the causal link between the two. And it is finally about making sure the claim is issued within the contractual deadlines, in the right form and in the right sequence. At every stage the contract manager's role is above all one of interface: they do not produce alone, they make what several disciplines produce converge into a contractually solid deliverable.
The AFCM, through its interface sheets, has formalised this reality. It is not a theoretical view nor an individual stance: it is a structural dimension of the profession that the profession itself has documented. Likewise the CMS (adopted by Prime Conseil) provides a reference framework for standardising the contract manager's scope, and it brings out the many interactions across the contract lifecycle. With the theoretical foundation laid, the intensity with which the contract manager works each interface (with legal, procurement, project management and so on) will depend on the context, the organisation and the contractual maturity of their counterparts.
Interface function and contract management: an illustration
To show what contract management really is, namely a profession of interfaces, I always like to take the example of project execution, and more particularly of what makes a complex project succeed or fail.
Take a turnkey EPC construction project. Such a project may involve a civil works package, a process package, an electrical package, a design office, one or more owner's engineers, an end client, and so on. Each of these players masters its own scope. The design office produces its design deliverables, the civil works contractor builds its foundations, the process package prepares its installations. Taken individually, each player may be perfectly competent. And yet it is rarely the failure of a single isolated package that causes a major overrun (there are of course counter-examples). Big cost and schedule overruns usually come from imperfect management of the interfaces between the players.
Were the drawings issued early enough, revisions included, for the civil works contractor to pour the foundations before the process package moved in? Can a cable installer work in an area without blocking the civil works? Who makes sure the design assumptions are consistent from one package to the next? On a multi-party project, overall performance depends less on the excellence of each package taken separately than on how smoothly and tightly their interactions and sequencing are managed. Anyone used to major projects knows it: interfaces are often the point of fragility, but also the lever that makes the difference on complex projects.
Through the lens of that example, we have just described precisely the role of the contract manager and what is expected of them.
Positioning contract management correctly
If we accept that contract management is an interface function, several consequences follow. The first is not to position the contract manager as a peripheral resource attached to a support department remote from operations. Nor can they be reduced to a technical skill to be called on demand. The contract manager must be positioned where the interfaces are most critical, that is at the heart of the project, in direct contact with operational and strategic decisions.
That is the whole point of this article and its conclusion: move beyond the support versus operational divide, which is far from a matter of semantics, in order to recognise the reality of a profession that does not fit the traditional boxes and, ultimately, to let it create value. Contract management is a profession of junction, of translation (or transposition), of alignment. Recognising it as such also means rethinking how it is deployed, how it is positioned and how it is valued in organisations.