Iman Naderi - M.Sc. Student in Industrial Engineering – Project Management, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran
Maryam Ashrafi - Assistant Prof.; Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran
Abbas Afrazeh - ssociate Prof.; Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran

The importance of "Project Contracts Management (PCM)" has significantly increased recently due to the emergence of strategies like "Outsourcing" and "Partnering". It should be paid attention that every activity of a project and therefore the whole project does need at least one contract, either in a writtenform or in an oral form. So, PCM can be defined as an initial and necessary phase for "Project Management (PM)". Therefore, this paper aims to develop a framework for PCM as an initial and necessary phase for PM. In the developed framework, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) is utilized to prioritize the contracts of a project. PCM has been studied from different perspectives, but little has been done considering it as a potential precedence for projects. Thus, it can be considered as the innovation aspect of this paper. Moreover, this paper has performed a case study on one of the projects of "Dena Holding", as an Iranian organization, to see the usefulness of the proposed theoretical concept in the real world. The main finding of this paper is that considering PCM as an initial and necessary phase for PM and determining how to allocate the contracting experts of a project, or their total available contracting time, to the project contracts will help project managers in better and more effective planning and controlling of projects. For doing so, the framework presented in this paper can be used.

Project Management, Project Contracts Management, Project Planning and Controlling, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making