The University of Sydney is planning to “overhaul six types of contracts this year” as it continues a program of work to overhaul its contract management process.

“We’ve fundamentally redesigned the look-and-feel of the contracts to be much easier to understand and apply,”director of legal operations Deborah Hook told Digital Nation.

The university enters “tens of thousands of contracts a year” but does not have a huge legal team to handle that kind of contract volume.

Instead, it provides “templates and toolkits for contracts” that different parts of the university can utilise when entering low-risk contracts.

Still, this created administrative burden, and challenges for the central legal team in ensuring what happened out in the university was compliant from a contract management perspective.

A decision was made to revamp the process.

“We sought to reimagine contracts from scratch, including the templates we use to make sure that everyday people would be able to read them and understand them, all the way through to a seamless handheld automation experience, so that we could capture the records, make sure things were done well and provide a great end-user experience,” she said.

Hook said the university re-used existing tools and resources to get the work off the ground. 

“We used what we had – that was the philosophy,” she said.

“We had a ticketing system – ServiceNow – where we could allocate tickets and have a portal where people could see statuses.

“We also have an existing relationship with DocuSign for e-signature of documents. We use the Microsoft suite for emails, for documents and all those sorts of things.

“[However,] what we didn’t have was a system to connect those seamlessly.”

Hook said the university had access to a ‘no-code’ platform from Nintex, however.

“We decided to pilot Nintex Workflow Cloud to … create a little bit of a canvas for us to bring these pieces together.”

Hook added the university took a design thinking approach, using a small timeframe to ensure they spoke to key users of the technology and taught themselves how to build a platform with Nintex.

She said the results so far had been positive.

“We’ve been inundated with requests to do this for more contract types,” she said.

“We now have a backlog of about 16 more contracts … and there are a lot of teams wanting to partner with us.

“For me, the big thing is it’s been well received by our academic community. They are delighted and enthusiastic it’s delivering on those primary purposes of making it a better place to work for them.”

The university is also making revamped contract types available under Creative Common Zero, where they are “available to the university sector and anyone else who asks.”