| In addition to the information collected through reporting processes specified in the project deed, the contract director should look outside the project deed for information relevant to performance monitoring. |
The private party is obliged by the project deed to provide information on performance against the services specification and output specifications.10 However the contract director also needs to separately obtain and analyse additional information on project. This additional information will often be ad hoc, may not be neatly presented and absolute, and will usually be highly dependent on the contract director's experience. The process of identifying the information to be collected must start with three fundamental questions:
1. What is known or measurable and can be used?
2. What is unknown and potentially immeasurable, and needs to be clarified and obtained?
3. What are the best sources of information (outside the contractual reporting requirements) to validate project objectives?
As the answers to these questions are likely to be project-specific, a number of different approaches have been adopted on different Partnerships Victoria projects to obtain information outside the project contracts.
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10 The private party's willingness to provide information may be conditional on appropriate protection of confidentiality in the project deed. The extent of the confidentiality protection for the private party will have been considered during the procurement phase as part of the public interest test. The public interest test is discussed in detail in Section 14 of the Partnerships Victoria Requirements (2016). The confidentiality provisions in the project deed will reflect the balance between transparency and confidentiality inherent in the public interest test.