Is Your Insurance Up To Date And Can We Have a Copy of Your Policy?

Let’s face it, it’s important that you are protected. Especially if you are hiring service people that will be performing tasks that have health and safety consequences such as window washing (they fall off the bucket-pulley), installing power lines (they fry themselves or people around them), or transporting hazardous waste (which doesn’t give people super powers, but can give them acid burns or deadly radiation poisoning). You don’t want lawsuits against you for a responsibility your service provider takes.

How many people do you have with the skill sets we require? How many need to have their certifications renewed in the next 12, 24, or 36 months? How many are within 4 hours of our location?

If you need 5 contracts with a given skill set and certification to do the job, and they only have 5, and those resources are also required by their other (higher-paying) clients, what is going to happen to your timelines? They are going to be shattered.

Moreover, if the certifications need to be renewed pn a regular basis, the last thing you want is a resource that is going to be grounded in 6 months to go take a training course if that’s a critical time in your project timeline.

And if you need a guaranteed response time by a certified professional within a few hours, if the closest resource is a 4 hour plane flight away, that’s not a good situation to be in.

How many claims have been made against you in the past year? And how does it break down in terms of safety vs performance/contractual guarantees?

Face it, if the provider is large enough, something is bound to have gone wrong according to Murphy’s law, or someone is bound to have made a claim, founded or not. And even if the provider is stellar, you need to know this as claims, and lawsuits, can take up their time and resources and put a strain on them that could carry to your projects if not known or managed.

Furthermore, safety issues are paramount so if the provider doesn’t have a good track record, you will need to think twice.

What is your on-time delivery rate for projects of the type we are requesting? When you are late, what is the typical root cause?

If you get this far down the list, then the next thing is to understand when something has went wrong, why. This can allow you to devise communication and monitoring plans to possible prevent disruptions or delays through early warning and better project and service people management.

What is your approach to joint project management? They’re your people, but they need to be meeting our project timelines?

If the service people are being hired to support a long-term critical project, and lack of the right people at the right time could jeopardize that project, then you need to now you have a service provider tha twill work with you to make sure you have the right people at the right time to meet your goals.