Calculate how much value your IT contract is losing

01 | Unadjusted scope | 1 | 3 | Has the service changed (more users, sites or systems) without the contract being formally adjusted? | Does the contract leave changes without an agreed rate or process? | changes are requested by email and billed “on the side”; change requests have no agreed rate; the invoice is the same, but usage grew more than 20%. | the draft says changes “will be quoted at the time”; there is no hourly or unit rate for changes; it does not define who approves a change or within what timeframe.

02 | Unused capacity | 3 | 5 | Are you paying for capacity you cannot prove you use? | Does the contract fix capacity with no way to adjust it to actual use? | licenses for users who have left; servers or cloud running with no traffic; bandwidth contracted at twice the actual consumption. | the price is set for maximum capacity, with no volume bands; licenses or capacity cannot be reduced during the contract; minimum commitments exceed current usage.

03 | Outdated rates | 4 | 7 | Have more than 24 months passed without benchmarking your rates against the market? | Does the contract lack a rate review or a market benchmark? | the price per server, GB or user has not changed since signing; adjustments only go up with inflation; there is no benchmark clause. | rates stay fixed for the whole term; adjustments only go up with inflation; there is no benchmark or most-favored-customer clause.

04 | Unenforced SLAs | 1 | 3 | Are service levels measured only with the vendor’s own reports? | Do the SLAs lack independent measurement and clear penalties? | the report says 99.9% and users complain; you have never collected a penalty; SLAs measure availability, not what matters to the business. | the vendor measures and reports its own SLAs; penalties have a token cap or require a formal claim; SLAs measure technical availability, not the service users get.

05 | Paying for effort, not outcomes | 2 | 4 | Does your pricing model pay for hours or resources instead of outcomes? | Does the pricing model pay for hours or resources instead of outcomes? | the rate card is unclear or immature; resource units and how they are billed are not defined; every new project comes with its own price. | the proposal quotes profiles and hours, not deliverables; resource units are not defined; every future project will be quoted separately.

06 | Automation arbitrage | 2 | 5 | Has your vendor automated or adopted AI, but your rates have not gone down? | Does the contract fail to pass automation or AI gains through to the price? | the service desk has a chatbot and you still pay for the same agents; monitoring and reporting were automated and are still billed as hours. | the proposal charges per agent or per hour even though it promises automation; there is no yearly productivity target; AI savings stay with the vendor.

07 | The exit trap | 0 | 0 | At your last renewal, did you skip evaluating other options because switching was too costly or difficult? | Does the contract lack an exit plan or an agreed transition? | no agreed transition plan; data or documentation held by the vendor; exit penalties that make switching unfeasible. | data and documentation have no agreed handover; early termination carries high penalties; there is no obligation to support the transition to another vendor.