IT Contract Specification
Securing favourable terms in contracting and negotiating for IT product license and services is critical for investment success. While you may know what you want, and how much you expect to pay for it, if it is not linked to obligation certainty, it is unlikely to happen. Sapience IT contract specification services allow Enterprises to enter binding relationships with software vendors and services providers with a high level of expected outcomes.
Talk to us before you sign, and we can ensure you have a framework of obligation to get your project delivered within the expected time and cost range. Sapience can provide in house templates or assist to drive documentation outcomes with your legal practitioner, ensuring that coverage across deliverables is thorough and obligation exits for non-performance are minimal.
Contracting For Implementation Services
A well-structured IT contract specification for implementation services should aim to protect the interest of both the Enterprise and the services System Implementer (SI). A common and major point of failure in IT project delivery occurs when the deliverable is unknown, but a service price is hard driven and fixed, providing no margin for the SI.
The price of a project is best driven once a solution blueprint incorporating known requirements and solution design has been authored. This document should be referenced before contract execution. See our services regarding this documentation here.
Project methodology as to whether an Agile model or classic Waterfall process, or a hybrid of both should also be known and referenced in contract documentation as the contract content is significantly different.
Other core components of a Sapience IT contract specification include:
- Clear identification of the parties
- Comprehensive and referenced detail documentation for scope and deliverables
- Responsibilities of both parties for supply of required information and provision of subject matter experts required to complete the project
- Term and Termination
- Payment terms, milestone assessments and the definition of ‘completed’
- Transparent total project price determination as to fixed components, variable components and change request components
- Process of acceptance testing and changes, corrections or amendment costs
- Clarity as to both existing and developed IP, confidentiality, license use
- Data security and GDPR obligations
- Warranties, liabilities and dispute resolution procedures
- Entirety of agreement
- Post go-live service arrangements and SLA’s
Contracting for License Procurement
It is vital to purchasing license that a ‘whole of life’ use of license view is adopted. While most licenscing is now period driven, or a SaaS model, the pricing discounts for volume and additional purchases can be significant. Total possible license count and use models as to pooled or concurrent (CUL), unlimited or named (NUL) should be known. There are significant alternative license models to these that often can price better.
While contracting for services is complex, licensing can be better known and offers many value opportunities for the purchasing Enterprise when approached in the right manner with the software vendor directly.
Contracting for Cloud Services Provisioning
Data security, business continuity, disaster recovery, speed and performance KPIs, single vs multi tenanted solution housing, specification as to storage, memory, burst performance access – where does this responsibility sit within your suite of service providers?
Don’t wait for an event. Ensure that when the unexpected happens, you have an expected strategy to action. The weight of this number 1 keep-me-up-at-night concern of todays CEO can be diminished with thoroughly defined service level obligations.
