I was talking to Phil, a former colleague of mine, last week and he was expressing his frustration over trying to build a contracts management software application on top of SharePoint. (Lucky me, just in time for a blog entry.) The way he told the story was hilarious, one of those Dilbert-type experiences that makes for a good laugh for anyone who has worked in an office for more than a week.

But underneath the laughter was a good amount of despair and Phil was feeling his position might be on the line. Most of his issues were around people not knowing what they really wanted the application to do and a failure on everyone’s part to understand the content management solution’s strengths and weaknesses.

No one really owned the process from the business side but lots of people had opinions – some very strong opinions and for very good reasons. Some were worried about the process of creating a new contract, some about missing legal obligations, some deeply concerned about risk mitigation, version control and compliance. These issues had been brewing through several corporate near-misses and one outright crisis that I won’t document here. One of the executives demanded the problems around contract creation and management be solved once and for all.

A manager had the idea of using SharePoint since they had it “lying around” and gave that idea to my friend and expected him to work some magic. Everyone on the team seemed to believe this was a viable option and faster than trying to buy a product or design a custom solution. After all, there was business pain that had to be fixed fast.

Weeks of research and many months of design iterations later and they were no closer to consensus, much less a working application.

After listening to this for a few minutes, I couldn’t help but chime in. The issue comes down to not having a complete understanding of the problem to be solved and the supporting belief that throwing technology at a process will automatically improve it. The solution hinged on people being able to effectively collaborate on a process with quite a few steps and the problem was different based on the role of the person looking at it. The initial creator of the document had one mission. The next person who had to validate information and sign off had a different goal. And so on, and so on, from start to finish. A big issue was that the workflow wasn’t static, there were many possible variations and exceptions based on a whole host of conditions.

The entire team was deeply concerned about creating reminders and escalations since a big part of the problem they were trying to solve involved issues falling through the cracks. Many attempts to diagram and customize the process had not resulted in a workable solution.

Finally, after several frustrating months and many arguments, he called me looking for some advice. The whitepaper we posted here, is our attempt to help Phil and others like him, get business value from their enterprise content management platforms. We decided to share with all of you with the hopes it spares you from Phil’s long hours and frustrations.

On Wednesday March 18th, we are holding a webinar titled “Are worst case scenarios buried in your contracts?” I talked to our speakers with morning and was excited about what I heard. The subject matter must have struck a chord because we have had an outstanding response. I have been directly involved in contracts for most of my business life; which is too long to admit. With all that experience, I learned a lot from Pat. His practical lessons and great stories hammered home the point on how poor contract management can lead to bad scenarios. From the straight-forward such as missing renewal options to the disaster of litigation, he covers it all. Great Content. I strongly recommend you join us on Wednesday no matter you experience level. Register for free at http://www.prodagio.com/landing/cwebcast1.aspx.