In the unlikely event of an emergency…

Few people ever look up when the cabin crew are performing the safety demonstration. Perhaps they are comfortable, having seen it plenty of times before or perhaps they are just too busy sending a final email before take-off to notice. Or maybe they just don’t want to engage with the great stress of an emergency.

In any case, the instructions are simple. Take care of yourself before others, follow the crew’s instructions and hang on for the ride. But what if you are one of the crew (or indeed the pilot)? What if you are the one that people will look to when an unforeseen event occurs? Your awareness of the potential risks and familiarity with the necessary processes and protocols to mitigate and/or respond to those events will either avert a disaster or exacerbate it.

Like spinning plates

Now if you are working on an average-sized PPP or PFI project, you are dealing with a contract containing approximately 13,500 pages which play host to 4,500 obligations and entitlements. You might only manage a sub-section of your organisations obligations under the contract – but even that could still number in the hundreds. Some of these will be straightforward, structured requirements that are due on a rolling frequency – and couldn’t be forgotten if you tried. Others might be so small as to not merit active management.

But then there are the event-driven obligations. Those events that trigger a series of required actions, often heavily time-critical, to ensure that the unanticipated does not become the unmanageable. Some may never eventuate at all – force-majeure events for example. Others will, but at a random moment during the management of the contract.

Critically, failure to respond to an event within the required time can often result in time-barred claims and other highly undesirable outcomes, such as financiers withholding funds. The impact that this can have on a personal, corporate and societal level can be enormous.

So as a manager of the contract, or as the director of the company that owns the contract, what can you do to ensure that the plates keep spinning?

Answer: Hire good people and adopt tools and processes that will set them up for success.

Fly safe

Technology today, such as Affinitext’s Intelligent Task Finder, allows people and organisations to instantly identify and seamlessly track and manage all of their contractual obligations and entitlements (including those that are event driven). It is technology that has “changed the game”.

Make your documents Intelligent today. They will optimise your performance, improve your organisation’s bottom line and standing and in the event of turbulence, they will help guide you safely to your destination.

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