Which contracts should we review?
The business question Which contracts should we review? shows the lifecycles of applications and components as well as the contracts that provide them.
Review contracts with impending end dates in order to make informed decisions about architectural changes based on your contracts with IT suppliers or service providers. Understand which contracts are associated with a particular vendor and ensure that license usage is in line with the contact deliverables. This business question helps you to manage your contract library, minimize planning risk, and avoid unnecessary costs.
The license package Contract Management is required to work with this business question.
A Gantt chart shows the lifecycles of applications and components and their associated contracts. You can expand and collapse the rows in the first column.
- The first level shows either
applications or 
components, their object state, and highlights conflicts due to the impending end of a contract's period of validity. The timeline shows a colored bar with lifecycle statuses and a red bar visualizes the active period (start date - end date) of the application or component. - The second level shows the
contract. The colored bar shows the period of validity (start date - end date) of the contract. A 
light blue diamond on the timeline highlights the contract's review date. - The third level shows the
contract deliverable with the number of used or planned licenses for the application or component. The colored bar shows the time period that the licenses are valid. A 
red diamond on the bar will highlight an overuse if more licenses are allocated for the contract deliverable than are permissible. - The blue vertical line indicates the current date.
- Relationships between predecessor and successor applications as well as predecessor and successor contracts are displayed as vertical lines:
- A black vertical line begins at the end of the predecessor application's lifecycle and points to the start of the successor application lifecycle. Point to the black line to view a tooltip showing the predecessor application, successor application, and end date of the predecessor application.
- A blue vertical line begins at the end of the predecessor contract and points to the start of the successor contract. Point to the blue line to view a tooltip showing the predecessor contract, successor contract, and end date of the predecessor contract.
The following data is required about contracts in order to have meaningful results:
- Every contract should have the Start Date, End Date, and Review Date attributes defined. If contract items are defined for contracts, the Start Date, End Date, and Review Date attributes should also be defined.
- Every contract (or its contract items) should have contract deliverables defined. The specification of each contract deliverable should include the Architecture Element which indicates the application or component as well as the volume of licenses that is being bought.
- The applications and components specified as architecture elements should have the Start Date and End Date attributes defined as well as their lifecycle statuses defined.
- Ideally each contract also has a predecessor contract specified so that it is clear what dependencies exist between predecessor and successor contracts.
Go to the Data Quality page and resolve the issues to ensure that the data is complete.
Go to the Data Source page to review the vendors, contracts, applications, and components that are used to answer the business question. The data source is a list report and cannot be edited.