Looking at the title of this post, you might say: what do contracts have to do with us? Let the legal departments deal with contracts.
As you know, since every department has different business subjects and areas of expertise, legal departments cannot be expected to have separate knowledge of every specialty.
For this reason, you are expected to help legal departments with the contract clauses that concern your business decisions.
So what are the important clauses to pay attention to?
- The work to be done and the definitions should be clear,
- Downtime periods,
- How quickly there will be a response in case of an outage,
- Penalty amounts for downtime periods,
- Service SLA times should be clearly defined and consistent with business decisions,
- Penalty amounts to be charged if service SLA times are not met,
- Clauses on renewal of the contract,
- The period during which the service must continue to be provided after the decision to terminate the contract,
- Fees and timelines for the work to be done,
- In case of an operational error, how the error will be fixed and how it will be compensated,
- The method for calculating the service SLA should be clearly stated and the ratio should be consistent with business decisions; there are many more important clauses like these to pay attention to.
Contracts are documents that protect your organization. That is why it is important to handle the clauses covered by business decisions carefully and to inform legal departments accordingly.
No matter how well-intentioned the parties are about the work to be done, undesirable situations can always arise.
