Guide to Agreement Review Rebecca Ullman

Ask for explanation of baseball Read the play- The game ended when pinch-runner Alexi Casilla took off from first base on a one-out liner to right by Ryan Flaherty. Shane Victorino made the catch without much difficulty and threw out Casilla for the double play. ''Flaherty hit that ball very good,'' Casilla said. ''He crushed it over my head. I kind of started running and looked where Victorino was playing and thought no chance he was going to catch that ball. I guess I kept running. Bad read.'' you can do a lot of project management and implementation by having a general sense of what’s going on- you submit the proposal, you get the money, you spend the money on the activities, you send in the reports, etc. But there will be situations where if you don’t know the rules, you’ll be in big trouble. It’s hard to know when these situations will occur. If you have to book a trip and you find a ticket on Easy Jet that’s $900 cheaper than the ticket on United, it seems obvious that you should book the $900 ticket. Wrong. Fly America. Or, let’s say you have 5 Sustainability Index reports due on Friday and it’s going to take you 10 hours to do each one. Looks like a long week in the office, right? Wrong. Under the CSOSI contract, each staff person can only charge 8 hours per day to the contract, so you have to figure something else out. What about asking someone on your team to help out? Wrong again- only people who are written into the CSOSI contract may charge work to the project. Or a trickier situation, let’s say your project is ending on December 31 and you have $50,000 left over. You have a new project from the same donor, same scope of work starting on January 1. Seems intuitive to think that the money the donor gave to you can be used to complete the work whether it’s on December 31 or January 1. Wrong. Once a project ends, you can’t bill to it anymore. The donor may choose to let you roll the money over or add it to your new grant, but that’s something that has to be in writing. Image courtesy ofhttp://www.baseball-pitching-tips.com/baseball-field-dimensions.html

So how do you learn the rules of the game So how do you learn the rules of the game? Easy- there’s a rulebook and that rulebook is called the contract.

The goal of the online exercise was to ask you to think about how to take a 20 page contract and understand how to implement it. This is a really difficult task and certainly not one that I fully understand. But we have to try/start somewhere.

Guide to Agreement Review Issue spotter, not issue resolver Living document

Ways to Use the Guide to Agreement Review New staff orientation When reviewing a new draft agreement As an annual re-fresher for agreement review.

Project Charters Memorialize certain functions, such as who has signature authority for which aspects of the project or who the responsible senior management person is Cheat sheet- easily accessible place to store information needed for project implementation. [I groan internally whenever I don’t know the answer to something and know I have to page through the contract to figure it out]Keep track of modifications.