In this new Devant video, managing director Tiffany Kemp explains a little bit about what Devant can do for you.
If you negotiate contracts on behalf of your business you might be interested to learn about our next contract negotiation workshop on April 17th. Limited places are available – please CLICK HERE for full details.
Our workshops are covered by a unique guarantee – all of your investment is returned if, at the end of the course, you are not thrilled with the content and what you have learned. Please click here for details or call us on 0118 3536000.
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Giving Indemnities – Does your PI cover you?
If you are in a professional services business, like Devant, you’ll almost certainly have paid a hefty premium for a professional indemnity insurance policy. The idea of this insurance is to cover you if you breach a contractual obligation and your customer decides to sue you for damages.
So what happens if you have a claim?
The first thing you should do when you realise that you may be subject to a claim is let your insurers know, while keeping in mind that successfully defending your claim is in your interest.
What if you’ve given a contractual indemnity?
As giving an indemnity is making a commitment on your part to the other side, which may lead to large payments of costs and damages, wording has to be clear, concise and cautious. Otherwise, many buyer-drafted clauses are effectively a blank cheque from the seller.
But won’t my PI insurance protect me? You’d expect so, but in many cases you would be wrong.
It may seem unfair, but think about it – why would an insurer sign up to underwriting any blank cheque you decide to hand over to your client voluntarily? The truth is in the small print – so make sure you look under the “exclusions” section of your policy.
So what does this mean in practice?
If your insurers walk away from the claim you will have to pay up from the company funds and if not deep enough, liquidation will follow. The existence and scope of an indemnity clause could affect your very survival as a viable entity.
So what to do… and what not to do?
When faced with a demand for indemnities you have a number of options – read the full article to find out more!
So what would you like to see covered in an in-depth article? Anything concerning contracts, negotiation, commercial management…let us know and we will do our best to help. Here are our existing articles to give you an idea of what we write about. http://www.devant.co.uk/index.php/latest_news/articles
Please leave a comment below.
We hope you had a great holiday. Here at Devant we are busy working on a new website and new branding for 2012.
It’s going to be a busy year for us with new services in addition to our new website so subscribe to our blog to be the first to hear the news.
In the works are new training services as well as easier and quicker ways to learn contract negotiaton and effective drafting.
Updates coming soon!
After over a year of planning, thinking, hard work and creativity, Devant’s free commercial contract training app is finally live, and available to download from the AppStore.
Wednesday evening heralded the launch party for The Butler’s Tale, bringing our creatives, voices, developers, clients, friends and family together to celebrate.
Clockwise from Top Left: Nigel Cairns of T-Systems, Becky Stevens, Animator, Liya Dabup of Devant, Jenny Benson, The Voice of The Butler’s Tale, Roger Huckerby and Alison Taylor of Devant, young Albert Kemp’s first work experience! Jan Wooldridge and Liya of Devant.
Preparing for the party, I looked back through the archives to trace the story of how a boutique commercial contract consultancy in the rural Berkshire countryside came to be launching an iPhone contract training app. The journey’s been a long and interesting one and I thought I’d share our timeline with you:
September 2003 – Devant created to deliver professional contract and commercial management and negotiation support to SMEs.
January 2005 – First Devant contract training workshop delivered! Heavy on Powerpoint bullets, and long on yawns…
September 2006 – After attending a specialist ‘train the trainer’ course in London, Tiffany determines to use memory stacking and a variety of teaching/learning styles to make commercial contract training fun and accessible!
October 2006 – The Foundations of Commercial Contract training workshop is born – complete with the first iteration of The Butler’s Tale!
December 2010 – After a lively debate with mentor, Jo Haigh, about the relative merits of mouse mats and pens as ‘leave behinds’, the idea of making an App from The Butler’s Tale comes to Tiffany on a snowy dog walk…
December 2011 – A year of hard slog, research, design and redesign and tweaking, with much fun along the way, The Butler’s Tale iPhone App is finally released on the App Store!
Tiffany demos the app live, via Apple TV, during the launch party – the small black line in her left hand is the iPhone running The Butler’s Tale. On screen you can see the ‘characters’, each representing a contract term. By watching the animation then familiarizing yourself with the legal terms the characters represent, you quickly build up an understanding of how the points fit together to make a workable deal. And, of course, it’s fun…
And finally, some more pics from the party. You’ll see we’re promoting the benefits of hard work among youngsters – both of the Kemp offspring did an excellent job of keeping guests fed and watered!
Clockwise from Top Left: Tom and Liya, Evie Kemp making an excellent waitress! On the right, Scott, the Voice of the Butler, with Jeff Antram and Paul Ryan of Step Up Software, who developed the App, with Tiffany, Lawyer Stephen Burns of Charles Russell LLP (Devant’s external counsel), Josh Spencer of TLC Business.
Wow! What an amazing experience!
Last Thursday, Liya and I met our Butler’s Tale voice-over artists for the first time. Jenny had travelled down from Lancaster to record the narration for the animation, and Scott had driven from Watford to make his debut as the Butler himself.
The venue for this momentous meeting was No Machine Studios in Wokingham, where the venerable Neil Sadler sat surrounded by sliders, knobs, speakers and complicated mixing kit. Plus about twenty guitars, lined up against the wall in case of emergency!
When we arrived, Scott was already in full flood. Listening to the voice coming over the monitors, we were expecting someone in their mid-60s. When the studio door opened at the end of a take, and Scott came through to say ‘hi’, Liya and I were surprised to see a 30-something chap who didn’t sound a bit ‘Butlerish’ in real life.
Once we’d nailed the Butler’s introduction, it was over to Jenny for the narration. Her soft Lancashire accent contrasted beautifully with Scott’s robust Butler (which occupies a strange nether-land somewhere between Stephen Fry and Father Christmas!). I hope you’ll agree when you hear the final app. recording that her voice has a truly magical story-telling quality.
After two hours of hard work, we whisked our ‘voices’ off for afternoon tea at the nearby Cantley House Hotel. Over tea and scones, we got to know each other better, before presenting our two competition winners with a case of vintage Champagne each and waving our farewells.
Huge thanks to commercial photographer Simon of Hyde End Studios for the excellent photos. I’m not sure how he managed to get such great images in the gloom of the studio, but we really appreciated his quiet professionalism.
If you’d like to join us for The Butler’s Tale Launch Party (Weds 14th Dec, 6-8pm) and haven’t received an invite, please drop Liya an email. We can’t wait to show the app. off, and see what you think!
From left to right: Liya, Jenny, Tiffany and Scott.
The Devant team has had a fantastic time listening to the entries to our competition to find the Voice of The Butler’s Tale for our upcoming iPhone App. We were overwhelmed with the variety and quality of the recordings submitted, and particularly with the talent of some of our own long-standing clients!
After struggling to whittle down the list of entries, we realized that it wasn’t possible to choose just one – so we’ve created an additional prize, for the voice of the Butler himself.
So who were our successful competitors?
We’re delighted to announce that the Voice of The Butler’s Tale will be Jenny Benson, from Lancaster. Jenny will narrate The Butler’s Tale, and her whimsical vocal style will be the perfect foil for the quirky animation created for the App by our animator, Becky Stevens.
And who will be the voice of the noble Butler himself? This role will be ably filled by Watford-based Scott Hammond, whose mellifluous tones strike exactly the right balance between wry humour and calm authority.
Our next task is to get our wonderful ‘voices’ into the recording studio to create our voiceover soundtrack. In the mean time our music man, Jamie Harper, is putting the finishing touches to the sound track. It’s going to be a challenge bringing it all together in time for the App’s pre-Christmas launch. Watch this space!
After month
s of hard work, we are planning to launch our very first iPhone Animation App, ‘The Butler’s Tale’, this December.
The app is a fun and engaging way to help you understand and recall key contract terms and quickly refer to them wherever you are. It tells a story in a cool and quirky cartoon animation with different characters each representing a key contract term. You get to learn more about the characters as the story unfolds.
So, what’s this Butler’s Tale?
It is the amusing story of a heroic Butler who goes on a challenging journey, overcoming many obstacles including an evil fairy! His mission is to deliver a very important document to his master. You will soon be able to watch the tale unfold when the app is launched but first, we need to find the Butler’s voice!
If you feel you have a great radio voice here’s an opportunity to showcase your talent. Enter our competition to be the voice of ‘The Butler’s Tale’ here and the winner will not just receive a credit on the app but publicity on Devant’s website and a case of vintage Champagne.
Hurry now; closing date for the competition is Friday, 24th November 2011.
by Tiffany Kemp
Yesterday’s IACCM member meeting at Fujitsu’s elegant offices in Baker Street, London, was well attended by senior commercial management and procurement professionals from a good cross-section of IACCM’s corporate membership.
My own presentation looked at how to facilitate positive commercial relationships with good risk management, when the business world we inhabit is becoming increasingly complex and fast moving.
Together, we examined the recent de Beers v Atos Origin case, which provided a comprehensive example of how easily things can go wrong. In that particular case, there were issues of:
- Functional novelty (Atos Origin had never developed a diamond aggregation system before!);
- Geographical complexity (the system had to operate across a number of African countries);
- Technological complexity (it was to be developed using Agile development methods); and
- Time and cost pressure (less than eight months to develop and implement the system, on a fixed-price basis)
Add to that a customer relationship in which the client, de Beers, appeared to be happy pushing all the risk onto the supplier, Atos Origin, and you have a recipe for trouble from the start.
It’s interesting that the commercial and legal team are generally made responsible for ensuring that contractual risks as appropriately identified, mitigated and managed.
Why?
Because the points in the customer relationship life-cycle where risk opportunities arise, and can be quickly mitigated, are not those in which the commercial or legal team has a significant involvement. If you think about your own business, your relationships with customers can be broken down into the following steps:
- The prospecting and sales phase
- The contracting and negotiation phase
- The delivery phase
Out of these three, which of them provide the best opportunities to get close to the customer, identify risks and issues, and resolve them amicably?
Arguably, the sales and the delivery phases fit the bill far more effectively than the contracting and negotiation phase. After all, when things go wrong in a relationship, leading to disputes and litigation, they generally go wrong because expectations have been mis-set (the sales phase), requirements have been mis-understood (sales again), or delivery has not gone smoothly (the delivery team). It’s rare for a client to sue a supplier because its commercial negotiators were incompetent, and yet they are the only ones we make responsible for contractual risk!
So if we were to distribute the understanding of commercial and contractual risk, and the language in which it is expressed, to those in the business who are in the best position to do something useful with it, wouldn’t that help?
If the sales and bid development team had a clear view on the impact of the discussions they were having with the client on the business’s contractual position, wouldn’t they be better equipped to use those opportunities to identify and mitigate risk?
And if the delivery team understood how their actions contributed to contractual risk, and what the potential impact could be for the business if certain client behaviours were not addressed swiftly, wouldn’t they act firmly and decisively to head-off risks before they became issues?
My view is that this is, in fact, the ONLY way that we can sensibly manage risk as projects become ever-more complex, and the workload on the commercial and legal function increases. Rather than employing eye-watering numbers of commercial managers and lawyers, let’s share a little knowledge, and develop a culture of commercial competence – and build great customer relationships while managing risk effectively.
If you’d like a copy of the full presentation, with detailed presenter notes, please email liya.dabup@devant.co.uk. To talk about how Devant can help your organization build its commercial competence, get in touch!
