From an internal perspective, the public partner has a responsibility to maintain minimum standards applied by its employees (or improve existing efforts to meet these standards) as part of its contract oversight role. Employee deliverables could thus be benchmarked against their job descriptions as well as the relevant outputs and outcomes specified in contract management manuals in assessing the extent to which they are effectively discharging their duties. Review could form part of the regular six-monthly staff appraisal process (however, the first appraisal could be conducted for new employees when they have completed their third month of service). From an external point of view, and even if the private partner is accountable for monitoring its own performance, service delivery outputs should be tested / validated by the public partner (or its nominees) on a regular basis against the consortia's contractual obligations. This could include, for example, adherence to agreed policies, frameworks and procedures; progress made against work plans and technical assessments e.g. public safety reviews; the achievement of outputs and outcomes against KPIs and milestones; and improvement made to the delivery of services arising from stakeholder feedback, and the implementation of audit recommendations. Other types of review could include five-year reviews to assess the level of progress made with regard to the achievement project business case objectives / justifications made for amending the contract; and overseeing benchmarking and competitive market testing that may also be conducted every fifth year to determine the relative quality and competitiveness of existing services with that of similar providers.