Cooperation in teams – Contracting Level 2: Professional Contract – video training

My name is Sari van Poelje, and I’m an expert in innovative agile design. One of the things I do is I help businesses innovate as quickly as they innovate their products.

So what we’re talking about today is contracting. We already talked about the first level of contracting, which is how to create a very good administrative contract, which creates the foundation or the structure of your cooperative relationship.

Contracting Level 2: Professional Contract

The second level of contracting, so how do I make good bilateral agreement, is what we call the professional contract. And the professional contract really tells you about what objectives are we going to realize together and under what conditions, what methods are we going to use for that? It’s much more about how do I define the problem? How do you define the problem? What are we going for and how are we going to tackle it?

So the conditions for a professional contract is it really has to comply to the SMART. So it has to be specific, measurable, observable, achievable, positive and within time.

So, questions you can ask yourself when you’re making a professional contract are:

• Who is the client?
• What is the nature of the relationship between all the parties involved? Obviously in a team or organization you’re always in a multi-party contract.
• How is the problem defined by each of these parties?
• What problem definition are we going for? In an organization, at every level you have different problem definition, so you have to be really clear who’s question you’re answering.
• What method are we going to use?
• What is the focus of our interventions and what is the final deliverable?

If you have those things in place, you have the administrative contract, which structures your relationship and then you have the professional contract, which tells you what you’re going to do together and how.

In the next videos we’ll take a look at the other levels. Follow me to find out more.