A professional services firm specializing in IT and non-IT services contracts, outsourcing, contracts business processes, and contracts management staffing

• Home
• | 
• Overview
• | 
• Executive Bio
• | 
• Resources 
• | 
• Contact 
• | 
• Services
  • Contracts & Outsourcing BPE/BPI
    
  • Electronic Contracts
  • Contracts Negotiation
  • SLAs and Contracts Management
    
  • Contracts Auditing
  • Contracts Staff Augmentation
  • SaaS, Cloud Computing and Hosting Contracts
    
  • Business Process & Knowledge Process Outsourcing Contracts
    
  • Government Contracts
• | 
• Case Studies       
  • SaaS Provider
  • Legal Department
  • Human Resources
  • Strategic IT Management

Specialization and Innovation

James River specializes in delivering value to business through contracts. Specifically, we provide professional services for the development, negotiation, management and resolution of contracts for selling or procuring:

• IT products and services with an emphasis on remote managed and on demand services
  
• Non-IT business services with an emphasis on outsourcing

Our new thinking about IT and non-IT business contracting enables our clients to conduct their own businesses with 1) better risk management, 2) greater value, and 3) closer alignment with business goals.

On Demand, Performance Based
Services and Pricing

We develop and implement standard contracts and processes, conduct competitive procurements, and provide contract negotiation and management services on an hourly, monthly retainer, or fixed price project basis, as little or as much as our clients need. Wherever possible, a percentage of our project fee is based on achieving performance goals.

Our services can be purely staff augmentation, in support of existing contracts and contracting operations. We can take command of difficult negotiations and dispute resolution talks mid-stream. We can also audit and renegotiate current contracts. Or we can implement new and original business practices using James River's own innovative and practical methodologies such as Sales Playbook and Service 2.0.
 

Business Services Agreements

Our Non-IT business-to-business (B2B) services contracts expertise encompasses operations, sales and marketing, procurement, human resources, professional services, management consulting, and all outsourcing. Service level agreements (SLAs) for B2B services contracts are a specialty of James River. Following our Linked Hierarchy (Link-Hier) model, part of our Outcome Centered Performance Management (OCPM) methodology, operations performance and output data is translated into business impact SLAs that measure the true value of the services for the customer’s business. For outsourcing, James River employs a Purpose Driven Outsourcing (PDO) methodology to manage outsourcing transactions and service delivery.

Outside Sales or Corporate Procurement

Our clients include either service providers on the sales side of a transaction or customers on the purchasing side of a transaction. If there is any appearance of a conflict of interest due to past representations — which rarely happens — we will tell our client immediately and . Working both sides of the transaction enriches all of our service offerings and is consistent with our overall value-oriented and strategic approach to contracting.

What Makes James River Different

• Value Goal Oriented. So much of what business transactions are supposed to be never gets included in the contract. The essence of what made the deal valuable to the parties vanishes. Risk allocation and opportunities to create new value through business relationships go completely overlooked. Often the reasons for failing to capture business value are very fixable problems. For example, most negotiations start without any thought given to how they might be structured. Discussions diverge into independent business, technical and legal work streams. Soon everyone is no longer thinking intelligently, they are too stressed out just trying to get a contract signed. James River helps companies to identify and articulate all of the business value, risks and opportunities of a transaction, then capture it all in the final contract document.
   
• Real World Grounded. Our services are taken from actually working in B2B and IT transactions. They are not elaborate and abstract ideas that came out of a graduate school research tank or licensed copies of the latest hot business book, though we do embrace good ideas when we hear them, regardless of the source. Take outsourcing. Many management consultants start from the top down, selling customers on expensive joint governance methods regardless of what is being outsourced or why, when in reality all that is needed is a well written statement of work for a project. Our business model is not dependent on high dollar, long term consulting jobs with a big ramp up.
   
• Forward Looking. One day in the not too distant future, 1) all businesses, regardless of size, will outsource many of their core and operations functions, and 2) a large percentage of B2B services contracts will be completed and signed online. James River is already positioned to move both providers and customers to virtual business models and to electronic contracting business processes, because we see the competitive advantages of both and know how to realize them.

 

IT Agreements

James River's IT contracts expertise includes Software-as-a-Service, SaaS cloud computing and all other types of enterprise IT related agreements: licenses, Web hosting, colo and managed services, application service providers (ASPs), network access, application development, systems integration, maintenance, compliance and security auditing, outsourcing, joint marketing, channel sales, and service level agreements (SLAs). Our Model On-Demand Services SLA (MODS SLA) breaks SLAs out of the “99.9% uptime and credits” mold, creating competitive advantages for provides and value engines for services customers. Our Software-as-a-Disaggregation (SaaD) analysis of SaaS platforms addresses dysfunction among related service providers that leads to SLAs and other terms that may be promised but cannot be fulfilled.