My career has been littered with enormous procurement contracts. Massive contracts totalling thousands of pages (including schedules) that are almost impossible for any one human to fully absorb or understand. I like big contracts because I don’t like uncertainty but there is a certain inefficiency to them and I understand why some people hate them.
Fortunately, my first experience of this was on a project that had a Deal Structure Paper (thank you Tracy) that sat alongside the Contract to communicate the principles of the monstrous document.
I have taken the concept of the ‘deal’ and used it throughout my career as a mechanism to focus my teams and develop my staff. On many occasions I have used the example of a phone contract purchase to make my ramblings relatable.
When we purchase a new phone contract we all look at the poster in the window which tells you the handset, how many minutes, texts and how much data for your 30 quid or whatever it may be. We never look at the contract. A substantial proportion of any contract is there to deal with process details and the remedies, it’s not where our focus needs to be.
So “summarise the deal” has been a request I have made of many junior members of my team to help them learn the skills to distil what is important. Where is the value? What are we supposed to be getting for our money? And I usually pin this to the front of Contract Management Plans to be kept at the forefront of our minds in how we manage the contract. It can then be communicated to stakeholders or handed over when team members move on too.
I’m not one for putting the contract in the drawer and forgetting about it, far from it but if we focus on the deal first and not the minutiae, we stand a great chance of achieving what we set out to do.
Let’s start talking about the deal, not the contract.
Kevin Smith
Managing Director
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