A buoyant market, a profession at risk of a race to the bottom
Contract management has never been in such high demand in France, and paradoxically, never so exposed when it comes to its future. Contrary to what one might sometimes read, the key factor shaping the future of contract management is not, in my view, artificial intelligence, but the profession we choose to pass on to those entering it.
I remember a time when contract management was a soft discipline. A field with shifting boundaries, practised as an extension of legal work, and more often than not as its poor relation: it absorbed whatever lawyers had no time to follow up on and whatever project teams did not want to read. Thankfully, that time has passed. Project directors are calling for the function, so are legal departments, senior management teams are budgeting for it, and schools are gradually starting to teach it. We still have to explain what it is, and probably will for some time yet, but we no longer have to justify its existence. That is already a small victory for those who have been practising contract management for a long time, and this article is not intended to play that down. Yet when we look at the future of our discipline over the medium and long term, euphoria quickly gives way to concern. Not because of the tools, nor the rise of artificial intelligence, nor even highly uncertain market conditions. But because of what contract management in France embodies, and will go on to embody, beyond the job title.
Demand that shows no sign of slowing
In a consultancy market that is tightening, contract management stands out as an exception. Positions are opening up, assignments are lasting longer, and organisations that had no such function are now creating one. Last week, at the annual Society of Construction Law conference, several public sector client-side project owners shared the same blunt assessment: they are still struggling with this, they know it, and they are looking for help. I wrote a post about it afterwards, given how widely shared that diagnosis was in the room. When a public contracting authority itself states what it is missing, demand has clearly moved beyond the realm of intuition.
This sustained demand for contract managers, now several years in the running, is not a fad. It stems first from the context: arrangements that are becoming more complex, deadlines that are tightening, and penalties that no longer forgive. It also stems from current conditions, since access to financing has become scarcer and its terms have hardened, making project financing more complex, not to mention the cost of each month of delay. The growing number of disruptions, whether geopolitical, climate-related or supply-related, have made contracts more fragile than ever before. In this context, a poorly managed contract costs far more than the function responsible for managing it, and every stakeholder in the contract has quickly understood this.
Far from being a support function, contract management has established itself as a lever for value creation and margin protection. Our discipline has won this first battle, which is something we can all be pleased about. However, this emerging popularity and recognition of contract management is also what puts the discipline at risk.
The temptation to fake it in order to meet demand
Market economics are what they are: when demand outstrips supply, the market does what it does best: it fills the gap, by whatever means necessary.
In our field, this too often means taking a buyer, a lawyer, an engineer or a project manager and slapping the title of contract manager onto them. Once in post, they are left to practise and learn on the job, with no training or support. My point here is not to accuse anyone; it is a (sad) observation of a response that is, all things considered, logical from economic players still subject to the same strong pressures on growth, margin and profitability.
However, a simple cosmetic fix does not create an illusion for very long (some of you may have personally experienced how heavy make-up rarely survives past the first date). Unfortunately, changing a job title does not magically transfer genuine contract management competence onto a project, and this quickly becomes apparent.
In some organisations, this results in frequent changes of contract manager and dissatisfied clients. In others, the outcome is quieter: a status quo that nobody dares to challenge, for fear of being unable to staff the function any other way, to the detriment of margins and project management.
To illustrate the excesses inherent in this imbalance between supply and demand, two recent signals struck me. The first is a job advertisement from the Ministry of Defence for a role leading the contract management division of a programme such as the next-generation aircraft carrier (PANG). Five to ten years of experience required, with a salary range of between 38,000 and 45,000 euros. The gap between the responsibilities, seniority and pay is as staggering as the mission sounds exciting. At this level of responsibility, this salary is simply out of touch with the market, and there are only two possible outcomes: either the recruitment drags on and goes nowhere, or it results in hiring someone who lacks the skills for the role, and who will not advance contract management excellence on a programme where contract management expertise is crucial. Either way, what an organisation is willing to pay says a great deal about the importance it intends to place on the function, or sometimes, more simply, about how well it understands the discipline.
The second signal comes from recruitment. At Prime Conseil, every week we meet candidates who are genuinely convinced they have ten or fifteen years of contract management experience. They have been project managers, methods engineers, lawyers, or project buyers. They have dealt with contracts, contract amendments, and sometimes even managed claims. All of this is true, and all of it is of course taken into account. However, ten years in project management, contract law or procurement are not ten years of contract management! They are ten years in a different discipline, one that touches on the contract without making it its focus. These candidates are sincere, but we are often the first to explain the difference to them, while the market, in a hurry, prefers not to.
Fifteen years of professional experience involving some exposure to contracts is not the same as fifteen years of contract management!
After these few paragraphs, let me clarify one thing: I myself worked in legal, finance and senior management roles before moving into contract management, and that background is a strength, not an anomaly. My point is not that one must be born a contract manager, but rather that one cannot simply improvise being a contract manager. Fifteen years of professional experience involving some exposure to contracts is not the same as fifteen years of contract management! On this point, I often draw an analogy with project management: nobody disputes that it is a discipline in its own right, with its own methods, frameworks and certifications, and nobody hands a programme to someone whose only claim to fame is having "contributed" to projects. Contract management demands the same rigour. It requires time, ongoing training, hands-on experience and a few well-digested failures before it can reach its full potential, because drafting, negotiating, executing or submitting claims are actions that many functions are familiar with. Contract management begins when one knows how to link these actions together, over time, in the service of a project.
Towards a race to the bottom?
Contract management is a strategic discipline that must be visible, heard and respected throughout the contract lifecycle
This slide is already visible, and it comes down to a simple mechanism: demand that struggles to meet supply ends up settling for whatever it finds. Hybrid roles are emerging, such as « legal contract manager », where the second term mainly serves to broaden the first job's remit. We see contract manager job titles whose actual content amounts to contract administration, with its registers, contract amendments to track and letters to chase. On project teams, we see contract managers springing up who, depending on their background, are in reality doing procurement with a contract flavour, legal work with an operational flavour, or project management propped up by the contract. None of this is objectionable in itself; it is often a good way to start out. But the danger lies not in starting out in contract management through iteration, but in letting temporary practices settle in over time: in this stage becoming the norm, and in what we end up calling contract management being nothing more than a low-cost version of it.
My view of the profession is quite different; in fact, it's a conviction: contract management is a strategic discipline, a decision-support function for those who run projects and organisations, a function that must be visible, heard and respected throughout the contract lifecycle. This passionate view, whose subjective side I readily admit, goes beyond the profession itself: it concerns the place of the contract within the organisation. The contract must not be a document that gets filed away after signature, but rather a vehicle that feeds a company's income statement every day, from top to bottom, including the top line. Before signature, we build the top line, and after signature, we protect and secure the bottom line. A function that holds this thread from end to end cannot be an administrative or support function.
Those who know me will already have heard me draw the comparison with procurement, and I stand by it because it illustrates exactly the danger I foresee for the future of our discipline. Procurement is, in my view, just as strategic a discipline as contract management. Yet it missed its turning point around fifteen years ago, for reasons identical to those described in this article: demand was so strong that the market started churning out poorly qualified buyers, hired quickly and paid (under the odds) accordingly. The result was an impoverishment of the profession, both in its substance and in its pay, and an image the profession took a long time to shake off. While we have seen buyers, and project buyers in particular, gradually come back into the spotlight over the past few years, this race for volume penalised the profession for far too long. Contract management today is exactly where procurement was back then.
This is the whole point of this article. The good period our profession is going through must not obscure the medium and long term. The contract management we "sell" today shapes what we will call contract management in five to ten years. Responsibility for the future of contract management rests with the entire ecosystem: schools, consultancies, professional associations and clients.
What role for AI in the future of contract management?
I'm often asked whether artificial intelligence will replace contract managers, a question I always answer with optimism and confidence. AI already performs very well in the area of contract administration: extracting obligations, tracking deadlines, initial reviews, correspondence summaries, everything repetitive and without strategic weight will be affected first. I mentioned this in last month's article: at Prime Conseil, we have been using AI in our day-to-day work for over a year, and we are already identifying concrete, useful use cases that do a good job of replacing a contract manager confined to simple monitoring and administration. On the whole, this strikes me as excellent news, because I don't know a single contract manager who chose this profession to keep a register up to date or draft letters.
What's more, I see AI as an opportunity to help our discipline, because if "fake" contract management is limited to administrative tasks and repetitive activities, then it is, mechanically, the first thing exposed to automation. AI should therefore do what the market, under pressure from demand, fails to do properly: distinguish between contract administration and contract management. Thanks to AI, the low-cost contract management I mentioned above has, in my view, little future, since fewer and fewer organisations will be willing to pay for services that can be so readily automated.
I also tend to temper my optimism about AI, because while the danger is not that AI will do the contract manager's job, there remains an urgent need to train contract managers to work alongside AI (rather than training contract managers to carry out activities AI already handles). What AI does not do essentially outlines what the profession must become, and therefore what will need to be taught.
AI does not decode the unspoken signals and power dynamics in a meeting room, it does not sense a project drifting off course before the indicators say so, it does not present a recommendation to a management committee, own it and defend it when it proves unpopular. The examples of what AI cannot do are numerous, and they define what contract management is and will become. Training programmes must therefore factor this in: AI is not an optional extra or a module tacked onto the end of a course, it must be a central component of training design, because knowing what to delegate to the machine is now part of what is expected of a contract manager. That is the thinking behind the work we carry out through Prime Academy, and it is what schools and organisations training tomorrow's contract managers must take on board.
Career change and training: the two keys to the future of contract management
I would like to close this article without leaving readers with the impression that contract management should become a closed club or an elitist discipline, it is exactly the opposite. All career changers are welcome in this profession, and they are in fact necessary, because the primary quality of a contract manager is neither a qualification nor a typical career path. As I like to say, it is a mindset, common sense, and a certain passion for the contract (on this last point, I'll admit there's plenty of subjectivity too).
An engineer who moves into contract management will read a schedule in a way no lawyer could, a buyer will understand a procurement cycle and a supplier relationship from the inside, and a lawyer will master the drafting subtleties of contracts. These backgrounds are not shortcomings to correct, they are assets to be connected, and it is precisely this work of linking different skills together that gives our profession its flavour.
The question should not focus on the background of a contract manager starting out, but rather on the support they receive from day one. On this point, responsibility is shared:
- On the consultancy side, we have a duty to support and train those we recruit, and above all to remain honest about our discipline: not to sell a profile as a contract manager when they are not yet one, even when the client is pressing and the assignment is lucrative.
- Training bodies have a central role to play in training these incoming waves of contract managers, and some are already doing this remarkably well: I'm thinking of the work done by E2CM or the university diploma at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, to name but two.
- Finally, organisations that recruit also bear a great deal of responsibility: not to take the easy way out when faced with recruitment difficulties, to maintain high standards regarding job content, candidate profiles and pay, and to accept the constraints of a tight market.
As I'm no master chef, I won't offer a recipe, but what I observe among those who successfully make this transition comes down to a few ingredients: mentoring (pairing, etc.) with a senior contract manager, quick exposure to real projects rather than textbook case studies, and the right to make mistakes as long as someone is there to review the work. None of these actions cost an organisation very much; they simply require willingness and organisation.
Finally, stepping back a little, and claiming nothing more than a practitioner's perspective, it seems to me that this subject deserves to be treated with a certain urgency. The challenges we will collectively have to face are well known: data centres to build quickly, industrial capacity to expand in strategic sectors, energy and transport infrastructure to deliver, and so on. The contracts governing, and that will govern, these projects are complex, with narrow margins for error.
In the years ahead, we will need contract managers who anticipate risks and opportunities and ultimately influence decisions, rather than contract managers who merely record them and bear the consequences, so we might as well make sure, right now, that those are the ones we are training!