You've won the contract. Is your business ready to deliver it?

Begin with the agreed contract documents, service requirements and relevant clarifications. Bring in the final submission and pricing assumptions, checking how they relate to the agreement. Where documents appear inconsistent, put the question to the authorised commercial or legal owner for resolution.

The delivery team needs a usable account of the scope, locations, volumes, service standards, reporting, dependencies and exclusions. Identify which requirements apply from the start and which have agreed later milestones.

Do not make people reconstruct the offer from a folder of documents. Prepare a concise handover that points back to the source for each significant commitment. Keep unresolved points visible, with someone responsible for obtaining a decision.

“Weekly reporting will be provided” sounds clear until somebody needs to produce the first report. Which measures does it contain? Where does the information come from? Who checks it, and who receives it?

Translate each commitment into the preparation required. Reporting may need agreed definitions, a template, access to records and a named owner. A response-time commitment may need a working request channel, cover arrangements and an escalation process.

Use a mobilisation register with a simple structure: requirement, source, action, owner, due date, dependency and evidence of readiness. That last field matters. It asks the team to show that an arrangement works rather than simply mark the preparation complete.

Mobilisation often depends on information, access and decisions held by the client. Identify those dependencies alongside your own actions.

They might include site access, existing records, named contacts, approval of a reporting format or availability for a handover. Confirm what is needed, who will provide it and when. Explain the effect of a delay while there is still time to respond.

Agree how mobilisation progress will be reviewed with the client. Keep decisions and changes recorded so everyone works from the same understanding. A conversation can resolve an issue quickly, but the outcome still needs to reach the people implementing it.

Look at whether the people, equipment, systems and suppliers will be available when required. Check competence, instructions and cover as well as numbers.

If a plan depends on a particular colleague, consider what happens when that person is unavailable. If a subcontractor is involved, confirm their responsibilities, required information and readiness within the agreed arrangement.

Bring operations and the commercial owner together where delivery plans differ from the assumptions used in pricing. Changes in location, workload or service expectations need an explicit decision. Quietly absorbing them during mobilisation makes it harder to understand the service and its cost later.

Walk a representative request through the proposed service. Who receives it? How is it recorded? Who decides priority? What does the person delivering it need to know? How is completion confirmed?

Include a difficult example. A request may arrive with missing information, fall outside the agreed scope or need attention when the usual contact is unavailable. Check how the team recognises and handles that situation.

For an illustrative service-desk arrangement, the test might follow a request from the client's email through allocation, delivery, confirmation and reporting. A working inbox is only one part of that sequence.

Use the findings to update instructions, responsibilities and outstanding actions before the service starts. A rehearsal is valuable when it exposes something that the plan has not yet resolved.

A start date tells you when the service is expected. It does not establish that the preparation is sufficient.

Agree the readiness criteria with the appropriate people. Separate requirements that must be resolved before starting from issues that can be managed through an explicitly accepted interim arrangement.

For each outstanding issue, record its consequence, owner, action and required decision. Do not let an overall green status hide an unresolved dependency that could prevent delivery.

If a critical requirement will not be ready, escalate early to those authorised to agree the response with the client. That may involve additional preparation or a discussion about sequencing. Any change to commitments needs the proper approval.

Mobilisation should include an agreed period of closer attention after the service starts. Its length and review frequency should reflect the complexity of the work and the issues likely to emerge.

Check actual demand, service performance, reporting quality and the exceptions the team encounters. Compare what is happening with the assumptions used to prepare. Give issues an owner and distinguish immediate fixes from changes requiring a commercial decision.

Define when the service can move into its normal management arrangements. The ongoing owner should accept the outstanding actions, records and review responsibilities. The mobilisation team should know when its work is complete.