This year’s IACCM benchmark study of the contracting process shows no improvement in typical cycle times for reaching contract signature. At a time when digitization and robotic process automation are streamlining many other business processes, the continued bottlenecks that delay contract closure are not good news.

IACCM is pleased to announce that it has been working with the Business School and Law School at Leeds University in the UK to develop a new Masters program (MSc or LLM) in International Commercial and Contract Management. Available as either a two year part-time or one year full-time course, this represents a unique collaboration between a leading business school, law school and professional association.

To be agile is to move quickly and easily. As a project management method, it is characterized by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent adjustments of plans. As a contract management method, it is characterized by collaborative relationships with outcome and performance-based contracts, designed to deal with high levels of uncertainty. The fundamental premise is that you can’t plan or contract for what is unknown, so decisions are made along the way as better information becomes available through experimentation and client feedback. This allows you to adapt as circumstances change and to counter predictive risk.

I am amazed at how many people want an answer to this question. More than 350,000 have read my blog on this particular subject. Is it because they don’t know the answer, or perhaps want reassurance that they are doing the right things?

“It’s not scary enough.”

Compared with the United States, China has taken a commanding lead in the levels of optimism among its young people – and that translates directly to upward mobility and wealth creation.

Is your organization on the path to commercial excellence? McKinsey, the global strategic consultants, are just the latest to grasp the critical role that commercial competence plays in delivering performance and growth. In a recent article, they observe that leading organizations ‘are now using superior execution rather than better offerings to outperform incumbents and drive growth’.

Marketing versus Procurement, Sales versus Procurement, the business versus Procurement … If you pay attention to the headlines coming from many Procurement trade bodies and associations, you would think that every day for the average Procurement Department is a battle.

A recent item on LinkedIn introduced the concept of a “pre-mortem” in decision-making. It suggested the need to explore the impact of an idea in advance – “one set of thinking is to explore if the project is a complete success, the other to explore the impact if the change made is a total failure. Imagine if Volkswagen had done a “pre-mortem” on their “cheat device” engineering? If Facebook had explored failure scenarios with sharing data with third party apps? If Wells Fargo had examined the operational impact of bonuses for new accounts? What if the moon mission in the 1960s had explored failure? Oh wait…they did. In fact, NASA is probably one of the more principled decision making bodies to examine countless “failure scenarios” and adjusting processes to reduce probability of negative events.”