REAL-TIME SIGNATURES

A process that relies on technology to sign and legitimize, in real time, the act of contractual modification in construction projects

The challenge To allow all VPs of Findeter to sign and approve in real time changes in project’s contracts, minimizing the risk of non-compliance with customers.

The outcome A digital tool that allows VPs to sign and legitimize changes in real time, as well as tracing the projects

The team This project was carried out by a multidisciplinary team of: technicians, lawyers, civil engineers, administrators, economists, communicators, among others. I had the role of facilitator and guide of the process.

The context Findeter is a Colombian development bank that plans, finances and executes sustainable projects in the country such as the construction of schools, universities, aqueducts, and libraries among other things. It is very common that contracts for this type of projects must be modified due to non-compliance with the deadlines or due to changes in construction materials according to the technical requirements of the floors. In order to modify them, it is necessary to hold a committee in which the VPs of the bank participate, and the project supervisor must explain the reasons why the contract needs to be modified, once the committee ends, the secretary does an act that must be signed for all the VPs. The committee last from 3 to 6 hours, and writing the act takes at least one week. Usually VPs are people who have a busy schedule, they are always traveling and attending meetings, so it is not easy to get the acts signed by all of them. In addition, acts represents a big amount of money and responsibility. As a result, VPs are reluctant to sign any documents without reading and analyzing them carefully. These are the reasons why the acts are signed, on average, 3 months after the committee. This is an issue that represents a great risk for different reasons: it is very expensive to stop a project for 3 months, it is very risky to have a period without an insurance policy during the extension of the contract, and also there is the possibility that regulatory entities impose fines for not presenting all the documents of the contract. Last but not least, delivery dates are hard to meet and often times projects can run over for several months.

The process First, all the actors of the problem were analyzed, several people were interviewed, we attended the technical committee and we sent a team member to the vice-presidency committee, which is confidential. We also talked to other teams in the company that were trying to solve the same problem. Some of the important insights that we obtained were that the act were signed by more people than what was really needed (this happened due to the fear of the VPs to take responsibility for the management of public resources alone), we also discover that those who sign the acts do not have the technical knowledge to understand all the reasons for contract modification, and also the procedures were delayed because they also required signatures of people outside of Findeter. They did not have a checklist of documents needed for approval, and no service agreements were made; the secretary who recorded the meeting made mistakes in the information and ended up writing very long documents (almost 40 pages long). After capturing this information, several solution ideas were generated and validated with experts from different disciplines within the company.

The solution The process of contractual changes was redesigned: a checklist of documents was established, a negotiation was done with the insurance company, and only 2 VPs of Findeter had the responsibility to sign the record (not 7). Additionally, a technological tool was created to write and sign acts in real-time, the tool also allows to attach files and documents needed to do contractual modifications, and it provides a trace and timeline for the project.(Pictures of the solution are confidential).

The tools to understand and capture information we did mystery shoppers, interviews, customer journey maps, ethnographies. To generate ideas we used analogies, Scamper and think PO. We prototyped using mockups and storyboards

Bonus Due to the development of this project, 4 teams that were looking for the solution to this problem, and did not know each other, managed to work together.