For the purposes of this assignment assume that you are the procurement director for a large regional hospital. You have recently renewed your maintenance contract with Clean & Cleaner LLC. This is a firm that has provided maintenance services for the hospital for the past three years. According to your own procurement ordinances the maintenance contract has to be opened up for proposals regardless of the performance of the incumbent. Clean & Cleaner LLC has submitted the highest scored proposal. You were glad that you can continue your relationship with the firm. Their performance has been exceptional and you feel that you have developed a very high level of trust.

While reviewing the newly signed contract you noticed two errors. First, for some odd reason the contract failed to formally specify the parties. This seemed to be such a silly error, you could not believe that no one has caught it. Second, the scope of work failed to specify a number of minor, yet important tasks that are expected to be performed by the firm. Overall these oversight did not seem like a big deal. You have worked with this firm for the past three years and you never had any problems with them. They were taking care of the minor tasks even without those being specified in the scope of work. It is just something they chose to do on their own as a matter of good business practice. Why would the next three years be any different? In addition, following your own procurement ordinance, in order for you to correct the oversight you would have to invalidate the contract and sign a new one. The only problem is that any changes to the contract and scope of work have to be reviewed by legal counsel and hospital's board of directors. Unfortunately, the letter only meet once a month and they don't meet again for another three weeks. The worst part of this is the fact while you invalidate the contract you will need to contract someone on emergency basis. Yet, you haven't had an opportunity to prequalify suppliers for emergency/temporary based contracts. In sum, the contract formulation issues didn't seem too bad and the effort and cost of having to fix it just seem too high. Besides, you are the only one who has noticed anything amiss. You can always address it a later date when things calm down a bit. At the moment, you have other, more passing issues to deal with.

Given the above scenario, please answer the following questions and prompts. Your answer should be at least 100 words in length for each question prompt.

1. Why should you care about clearly specifying the parties in the contract? Is it a really a big deal?

2. Why should you care about the missing tasks in the scope of work? The firm is taking care of them anyway on their own initiative.

3. What will you do? (please be specific about your decision, rationale, and plan of action)

4. Please enumerate and analyze the risks associated with your plan of action in point 3.

Thank you for your response.