Contract Negotiation

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Essence

To be a successful contract negotiator, one must possess a multifaceted skill set. Firstly, thorough preparation and research are essential, ensuring a clear understanding of goals, priorities, and potential compromises. Effective communication, negotiation skills, and a grasp of legal and industry knowledge are paramount. Additionally, strategic thinking, patience, and persistence contribute to navigating negotiations successfully. A negotiator should also cultivate emotional intelligence, flexibility, and creativity to build positive relationships and find mutually beneficial solutions. Strong documentation skills, ethical conduct, and risk assessment further enhance the negotiation process. Lastly, effective collaboration with internal teams is crucial for alignment and support throughout negotiations, contributing to the creation of positive and enduring business relationships.

Experience

I understand that negotiating contracts involves a balance of effective communication, problem-solving, analytical thinking, interpersonal skills, business acumen, ethical considerations and cultural sensitivity. Negotiators need to navigate complex discussions, build positive relationships, and secure agreements that benefit all parties involved. Continuous improvement in these skills is essential for successful contract negotiations in various business contexts.

In addition there's preparation and research, and of course confidence and assertive communication. It's also crucially important to work with legal experts to ensure contract legality and compliance.

The vast majority of the contracts I've negotiated are relatively low in value (less than $1m), however at easyJet and IBA I spent considerable time working through some high value contracts. For IBA I worked closely with the CTO and we engaged a legal consultancy to navigate a multi-million dollar fixed-priced contract with Infosys to deliver the core business platform. The complexity revolved around the obligations IBA had to to determine the configuration detail through workshops. I also negotiated an on-going support model, complete with SLAs and penalty clauses for outages etc. The contract was eventually signed with clauses in to protect IBA from the disruption Covid could cause, and also requirement ambiguity. A lesson learned from this negotiation is that vendors are usually highly skilled at contract negotiation, and the relationship is often just as important as the words on the page. I learned that requirements and obligations written into a contract need to be rock solid, and where there is doubt, transparency about those risks need to be surfaced.

At easyJet, working with a procurement expert, I negotiated a contract with TCS to run and maintain an Integration Competency Centre. We also negotiated with RedHat to install and configure the JBoss middleware components on in-house infrastructure. Establishing the various handoffs from infrastructure to RedHat and from them to TCS was the most challenging aspect of the negotiation. However, it was a successful program, and remains an important factor in easyJet's agility and helps them keep applications in an evergreen state.

Credentials