Week 418

• James headed off to the snow on Thursday for just over a week of skiing. It sounds as though the weather’s been good but the snow’s starting to get a bit thin.

• We continued to help organise a CoTech evening during Open 2017.

• I met Jon Leighton at the BFI on Thursday. It sounds as though we have quite a lot in common and I look forward to seeing whether we can work with Jon in future. Jon’s currently looking for freelance work so get in touch with him if you think you have something suitable.

• We filed our Confirmation Statement (the thing that replaces the Annual Return) during the week. We already had a process in place to file our Annual Return so we updated that to reflect the differences in the Confirmation Statement. It struck me that this would be an easier job if we had processes in place to keep the required information up to date throughout the year; rather than having to look it up at the point of filling out this statement.

 GDS contract

We continued to make progress with the GDS contract, which mostly involved reading through two quite similar contracts from Digital Gurus. I continue to wish that contracts were delivered as text rather than PDFs.

We discussed the idea of being able to replace the contractual definitions and then inlining those definitions in the contract. Look at the definition of Supplier, for example:

Supplier: means the employment business through which the Company is supplied to the Contracting Body via the Service Provider to carry out the Services;

Substituting the values of the other definitions leads us to:

Supplier: means the employment business through which GFR is supplied to GDS via Capita to carry out the Services;

Which can eventually be reduced to:

Supplier: Digital Gurus

I can only imagine that the contract would be much easier to read and understand if, instead of having to read “Supplier” and make the mental jump to “Digital Gurus”, it just said, “Digital Gurus”.

Until next time.

– Chris