IT contracts: A study of mindsets

A survey-study of IT contracts was commissioned by the Singapore IT Dispute Resolution Advisory Council (SITDRAC), and was conducted by the Information Management Research Centre (IMARC) of NTU.
Associate professor Ang Soon, and assistant professor Christine Koh share briefly a few points of the study:

IT contracts are like marriages
For an IT contract to work, both parties must fulfill their respective ends, just like a marriage. Clients and vendors entering into a contract hold certain implicit expectations of each other, and these are to be met if the project is to be completed with mutual satisfaction.

This is what is termed the psychological contract, a reference to the mental beliefs and expectations about mutual obligations in a contract.

The survey was conducted to understand what IT clients and vendors expected of each other.

During the study, 13 senior management from IT vendors and clients in Singapore were interviewed. This was accompanied by a large-scale survey in which 22 client organizations and 52 vendor organizations participated, providing 249 responses.