What a Contracts & Procurement Manager Actually Does All Day

The job title sounds tidy. Contracts and Procurement Manager. You manage contracts. You manage procurement. You sit somewhere between legal and finance and make sure the organization is buying the right things from the right vendors at the right price, with the right paperwork in place. That is what the job description says.

Here is what the job actually is.

7:45am — Before the day officially starts

The first thing they do in the morning, before email, before the first meeting, is check their phone.

Not for news. For the vendor that messaged at 11pm asking about the status of a contract that has been sitting in an approval queue for three weeks.

They already know the answer. The contract is waiting on a signature from a department head who has been traveling. Two follow-up emails have been sent. The department head's PA was spoken to. The PA said she would remind him. The reminder did not produce a signature.

The vendor gets something professional and non-committal. The contract continues to wait.

This is how the day starts. Not with strategy. With damage control on something that should not have needed managing at all.

9:00am — The morning review

There is no system that tells you what needs attention today.

There is a spreadsheet. Updated manually, usually by the Contracts and Procurement Manager themselves, tracking active contracts, their status, their renewal dates, and who is responsible for each one.

The spreadsheet is never fully accurate. It reflects the state of things as of the last time someone updated it, which may have been last week. Three new contracts have come in since then. One was filed. Two are sitting in someone's inbox awaiting initial review.

So the "morning review" is not really a review. It is reconstruction.

Assembling a picture of the current state from emails, WhatsApp messages, a shared drive organized by someone who left the company in 2022, and pure institutional memory.

This takes longer than it should. Every day. It takes this long every day.

10:30am — The call from a business unit

A manager in the commercial team has signed an agreement with a new vendor.

Not a full contract, he says. Just a letter of intent. He mentions it because the vendor has started delivering services and will be sending an invoice next week.

Omo.

The Contracts and Procurement Manager knows exactly what this means. The business unit made a commercial commitment before procurement was involved. The vendor is already a de facto supplier. A contract now needs to be drawn up retrospectively to formalize an arrangement that has already begun. Procurement's leverage in that negotiation — which was never great — is now zero.

And here is the thing: the manager on the call is not trying to cause problems. He is trying to do his job. The procurement process, in his experience, takes too long. So he moved without it. He made a rational decision inside a broken system.

The Contracts and Procurement Manager does not say any of this out loud. They ask for the vendor's details and say they will get a draft framework agreement prepared.

That discipline — swallowing the frustration and just solving the problem — is also part of the job.

12:00pm — The renewal

A software vendor contract expires in 47 days. The spreadsheet highlighted the date in yellow. Yellow means act soon. Red means act now.

Most things are yellow or red.

To renew this contract, they need: a decision from the business unit on whether they want to renew, updated pricing from the vendor, a review from legal, approval from the CFO, and a signature from whoever the authorized signatory is for contracts above a certain value.

47 days sounds like enough. It is not.

The business unit will take two weeks to confirm they want to renew. Pricing negotiation will take another week. Legal review will take one to two weeks depending on what else is on their desk. CFO approval will take whatever it takes.

The Contracts and Procurement Manager starts the process today because they have learned, the hard way, that starting early is the only way to finish on time. The system will absorb every day of runway you give it and still ask for more.

2:00pm — The board report

Every quarter, a procurement report goes to the board. Total procurement spend, vendor performance against SLAs, contracts due for renewal in the next 90 days, any compliance flags.

The data comes from the same spreadsheet. The same shared drive. The same reconstructed picture of reality assembled every morning.

Preparing the report means cross-referencing three different data sources, chasing two department heads for information they should have submitted last week, and making judgment calls about how to present numbers that are accurate but incomplete.

The board will review this report for approximately four minutes.

4:30pm — End of day

The vendor from this morning has sent a follow-up. Still waiting on the contract status. Professional response sent.

The spreadsheet has been updated. Two items that were yellow are now red. One that looked comfortable last week has turned yellow because the CFO's approval took longer than expected.

Tomorrow, the review begins again.

What this role is actually about

A Contracts and Procurement Manager at a Nigerian enterprise is not primarily a contracts person or a procurement person.

They are an information manager operating in an environment that was not built to surface information easily.

The core challenge is not finding the right vendors or negotiating the right prices, though they do both. The core challenge is maintaining visibility over a large, moving portfolio of obligations and commitments using tools that were built for completely different purposes.

The spreadsheet is not the problem. The spreadsheet is the solution someone built because no better solution existed. It is the result of a smart person adapting to a broken environment. Understanding that is the starting point for understanding what this role actually needs.

These people are not struggling because they are bad at their jobs. Most of them are remarkably good at their jobs. They are struggling because they are very good at their jobs inside a system that makes every part of it harder than it should be.

That is worth understanding before anyone tries to fix anything.

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Part of an ongoing look at how Nigerian organizations actually operate — not how they say they do.