Contract Diagnostics

What is a contract management maturity audit?

Three to eight weeks. Interviews with the people who live with the contract every day, in sales and pre-sales, legal, procurement and operations, and ten to thirty representative contracts examined for comparative purposes. We are not there to grade your compliance. We are looking for the place where money leaves without anyone noticing: the penalty nobody ever invoked, the amendment agreed over the phone, the claim you can no longer evidence because nobody wrote down the date, and more.

Most organisations know they are losing value somewhere in their contracts. Without a diagnostic, nobody can say where, or how much. That is the question the Contract Diagnostics answers. You are left with a maturity score on each axis and a roadmap you can put in front of your executive committee.

The six axes

What you get

• A full audit report, with a map of how contracts can be handled more effectively
• A maturity score, overall and for each axis
• Prioritised recommendations, strategic and operational
• An improvement roadmap you can resize to your means
• Recommendations on people, tools and governance

Who it is for

Questions I am asked about the audit

What is a contract management maturity audit?

A structured look at how an organisation manages its contracts, from signature to close-out. I measure actual practice on six axes (governance, skills, processes, tools, risk, knowledge capture), turn that into a maturity score, and derive a prioritised improvement roadmap. The point is not to pass judgement. It is to find where value is being lost, and where to start.

How long does it take?

The Contract Diagnostics takes three to eight weeks, depending on scope. It is deliberately short. The aim is a clear picture and decisions you can act on, not a report that takes longer to read than it took to write.

Which axes are assessed?

Six, and they complement each other: contract governance, in-house skills, processes and steering, tools and automation, risks and obligations, knowledge capture and continuous improvement. Each one gets a score, so strengths and weaknesses can be compared and effort focused on where it counts most.

Who is it for? Do you need a contract management team in place?

It is aimed first at executive management, procurement and legal, and at the teams that run contracts and watch the profit margin. You do not need a contract management team in place; whether you need one at all is precisely one of the things the diagnostic addresses. Depending on size, maturity and what is at stake, the conclusion ranges from creating a dedicated team to a distributed model where the role is carried part-time by people already there: lawyers, project managers, buyers, operations. If that is what we uncover, that is what we will share with you.

How many contracts do you need to start?

A sample of ten to thirty representative contracts is enough. Nobody needs to dig out the whole archive.

What return should you expect?

On average, weak contracting erodes 8.6% of contract value, and the best performers hold that near 3% (World Commerce & Contracting with Deloitte, The ROI of Contracting Excellence, 2023). The diagnostic shows where value is leaking in your contracts and what it would take to stop. Whatever an industry average says, the figure that matters is yours, and that is the one we will provide to you, and drive up overall project management performance.