Contract Management - The Basics

Contracts come in many shapes and sizes.

It's easy to forget they expire and you need to renew or renegotiate your options.

A bit of planning and organisation is the best means to avoid being caught out. *sigh* I hear you say... It's not that bad...

What is contract management?

Basically, it's keeping your contracts in order; from the negotiation stage right through to sunset.

If you develop a contract management process with the principles and fundamentals from the outset, it will make your life so much easier - then it's just the maintenance as you go along!

Keeping track

Keeping track of the details is tricky, and is best done by:

• Maintaining a spreadsheet which lists all your agreements as a line item, and lets you know the specifics about them, like:
• Who the other party is
• What the agreement is for
• Who the contact person is, and their details
• What the deliverables are
• Timelines for those deliverables
• Start and expiry dates
• Insurance requirements
• Financial caps (even more important is how you monitor these)
• Use your email calendar to help with expiry dates, and set regular appointments where you go through all your contracts that are coming up for expiry/renewal so you can start the process early (we meet 3 monthly)

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Image from http://dilbert.com/strip/2009-11-10