Do we even have a contract for this

The question that keeps billion dollar projects awake

A few minutes into a recent call with a senior technology leader at a global resources company, she paused, took a breath, and said something that has stayed with me ever since.

“We engage a lot of people to do work for us. We have statements of work. We have contracts. But we do not actually have clean visibility to all of it. Sometimes we are not even sure if we already have a contract in place or if we should be drafting a new statement of work. It feels like a gap that nobody really owns.”

You could almost hear the frustration behind the calm delivery.

On paper this is a world of immaculate governance. There are templates, category strategies, panel arrangements, vendor risk frameworks, legal review processes, procurement policies, steering committees.

In reality there is a much messier question that keeps surfacing at the pointy end of delivery.

Do we even have a contract for this work we are about to approve

The invisible gap between “we have a contract” and “we are doing work”

If you work in technology, projects, or operations inside a large organisation, you probably recognise some of these moments.

A team needs a new vendor on site next month. Someone remembers that there was a master agreement signed a while back, but no one can quite remember what is covered.

A statement of work from two years ago is dusted off and repurposed for a new piece of work because it is faster than starting from a blank page. The names change. The dates change. The assumptions and risk allocation do not.

Procurement is trying to drive standardisation and better pricing. The project team is trying to hit a go live date that has already slipped once. Legal wants to make sure the liability caps, IP provisions, and safety obligations reflect the current risk environment.

Everyone is acting in good faith. Very few people have a single place they can go to answer some basic questions.

What contracts already exist that are relevant to this work

What do those contracts actually say about scope, rates, risk, and “what good looks like” for delivery

Where are our statements of work that sit underneath those contracts and how aligned are they

No one wakes up in the morning and says “my job is to be the human router for every contract, statement of work, and variation across our entire portfolio”. The responsibilities are shared across legal, procurement, finance, project controls, technology, and operations.

Which is another way of saying they are shared so widely that this crucial piece of visibility is often owned by no one.

What “no visibility” looks like on the ground

When people talk about “lack of visibility” it can sound abstract. In practice it looks very concrete.

It looks like project managers keeping their own private spreadsheets and email folders because that is the only way they can keep track of which statements of work belong to which contracts.

It looks like commercial teams being pulled into urgent calls because someone needs a yes or no answer on whether a particular vendor is actually approved to do this scope of work at this site.

It looks like rework. New statements of work being drafted when a perfectly good framework is already sitting on a shared drive. Existing work being extended under documents that were never designed for that kind of risk or duration.

It looks like value leakage. Not always in spectacular ways. More often in small decisions that shave a little bit off the original commercial intent.

A slightly looser definition of scope here.
A set of deliverables that never quite made it into formal language there.
An escalation process that exists in the contract but is unknown to the people actually delivering the work.

Over time those tiny cuts add up.

When you are talking about billion dollar project execution portfolios, even one percent of value leakage is not pocket change. It is millions of dollars that quietly slip between the cracks because the organisation cannot see its own commitments clearly enough, quickly enough, in the moments that matter.

The cost is not just financial

The financial story is the easy one to tell.

The quieter story is psychological.

Teams start to internalise the idea that the contract is something distant and untouchable.

It is a document that lives in another system, owned by another department. Something you reference when there is a dispute, a claim, or an audit. Not something you use as an active tool for day to day decision making.

So people fall back on memory, habit, and a thousand slightly different interpretations of what “good” looks like.

You hire smart people, ask them to run complex projects, then deny them the basic context they need on the commercial side of the house until something goes wrong.

No one designs it this way. It emerges from growth, acquisitions, new systems layered on old systems, and the simple fact that contracts and statements of work live in many places and formats at once.

Email inboxes.
Shared drives.
Legacy contract management tools.
Project delivery systems.
Procurement platforms.

All of them hold pieces of the truth. None of them offer a single, trusted view of “this is the work we committed to do, with this vendor, on these terms, and this is what good looks like right now”.

Why a tech leader cared enough to call it out

The leader who made that comment did not sit in legal or procurement. She sat in technology and strategic programs.

Her job is to help the organisation work smarter with technology. That includes AI initiatives, automation, and simplification of the way work gets done.

What struck me was that she had gone looking for someone who owned this problem inside her company.

She had looked for a team, a program, a tool, anything that was answering simple questions for her and her colleagues.

Do we have a contract here

Should we go down this route or that one

If we just have a vendor relationship with no contract, what does a good statement of work look like for this kind of engagement

She had not found anyone.

So she described it for what it is.
A gap.

Not a small one. A gap right at the intersection of money, risk, and reputation.

What if the contract was not a filing cabinet but a live system

This is where AI can finally earn its keep in the contract world.

The opportunity is not to generate more contracts faster for the sake of it. It is to take the contracts you already have, the statements of work you are already using, and the vendor history you already own, and turn that into live intelligence for the people doing the work.

Imagine if a project manager could ask a simple question in plain language.

“We want to bring Vendor X in to deliver this scope at Operation Y. Do we already have a contract in place that covers this And if so, what does good look like for the statement of work”

And instead of starting a weeks long correspondence thread, the system could answer in seconds.

“Yes, there is a master agreement for Vendor X that covers this operation. Here are the clauses that define scope, safety, data, IP, and change. Here are similar statements of work you have used before, with a summary of what worked and what did not. Here is a starting template that reflects your current view of risk and commercial intent.”

Not by replacing your commercial teams and lawyers. By giving them leverage. By making sure the sixty to seventy percent of work that is repeatable and pattern based is handled by a system that never gets tired and never forgets where the documents live.

Bridging the gap is where the value is

At Hevi we think less about “contract management” as an abstract category and more about very specific moments like the one in that conversation.

A leader who can see the operational reality.
Multiple vendors.
Lots of work.
Lots of contracts and statements of work.
Not enough visibility.

Our job is to bridge that gap.

To take the scattered body of contracts and statements of work that already exist in your world and make them searchable, understandable, and actionable for the people making decisions every day.

To surface the answer to “do we even have a contract for this” before a new statement of work is drafted, not after a dispute has already started.

To show what good looks like in your context, for your risk appetite, using the lived history of your own projects rather than a generic checklist.

When you do that, you do not just avoid bad outcomes. You create better ones.

You buy with more confidence.
You scope with more clarity.
You brief vendors in a way that sets them up to succeed.
You give your teams the confidence of knowing that the commercial side is not a black box.

And yes, you protect the bottom line at the same time.

The real innovation is ownership

The technology matters. Large language models, retrieval, document intelligence, all of that sits under the hood.

But the real innovation is simpler. It is about deciding that this visibility gap is no longer acceptable.

That “we are not sure if we have a contract for this” is not a harmless shrug. It is a signal that millions in value and a lot of trust are at stake.

Someone has to own that.

For the leader on that call, it started with naming the problem out loud.

For us, it reinforces why we exist at all.

If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, it is worth asking a simple question in your own organisation.

Right now, today, if someone in your team needs to know whether there is a contract for a new piece of work, how long does it take to get to a clear answer

Everything that happens in that gap is an opportunity.

‍