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.
