Blog on contracts, “AfiTaC.com”, new status after 6 more months

Six months ago, we had published a first situation concerning the interest in the blog on contracts, “Afitac.com”. You can read it by clicking here. Now, curious to see how this blog has developed?

World access map

Because an image says more than a thousand words, we simply show you our world map which has further colored blue. Only very few countries have nobody connecting to this blog. And, as the below list of biggest participating countries shows, all continents are nicely represented:

• USA
• France
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• India
• United Arab Emirates
• Brasil
• South Africa
• Australia
• Spain

Changes over the past half year

The biggest shift was as follows:

• Back in April, a large part of people visiting this blog where redirected from LinkedIn. Especially, groups on FIDIC or Project/Risk Management had very active participation. However, over the past months, LinkedIn implemented important modifications, reducing its contribution: 
  • A shift from specialized groups to #subjects similar to Twitter, resulting in very limited activity in groups.
  • They now favor video content above text messages.
  • Posts containing external links are shown to less people (limiting “impressions”).
• Nowadays, the search engines are bringing most new people. The chart below, with the number of visitors sent by search engines (mainly Google and Bing), shows this nicely. From April to June, on average, one or two persons reached the site after an internet search. This continues to increase with now more than 10 visitors per day.

Most popular articles of this blog on contracts

The search engines are now picking up the articles about a wide range of subjects: Negotiation, FIDIC, Tendering Process and Contract Risk Scoring. The most popular once are:

• EPC Contract, win-win negotiation, LNTP on private investment project
• Thank you FIDIC for explaining changes introduced with FIDIC Rainbow Suite (ed. 2017)
• Tendering, affiliate companies bidding for the same project, acceptable or not?
• How to establish reliance data in EPC Contracts (like FIDIC Silver Book)?

We also introduced a more fun way to reflect on, or learn about, contract management principles with our series “Contract Management & Music”:

• Delay LDs for Natalie Imbruglia
• Time Bar struggle for Muse
• What is the perfect “negotiation chill out music”?
• “I can’t get no satisfaction” (The Rolling Stones)

This series was hugely popular on LinkedIn with more than 12 000 vies and 148 likes for the summary post:

Other features of this blog on contracts

Over summer, we launched a self-assessment, named “During/after holidays is a good time to self-assess your commercial & contract competences“. The results are helpful for you to determine your development areas and for us to target subjects for future posts. By the way, you can still give it a try. It contains 10 subjects carefully selected enabling you to perform the assessment in 2 minutes. It is targeted to Project, Contract and Tender Managers mainly active in construction, infrastructure, oil & gas and renewable energy projects.

The Tender Risk and Contract Review system, TRaCRs, that enables you to score the risks and get a general understanding of your projects in order to make objective decisions, continues to draw good attention. The following articles explain fthe main principles:

• Contract Risk Scoring, 10 questions answered
• Contract Risk Scoring, how can it help you in your decision process?

For those interested in (or, unfortunately, pushed into) dispute resolution, relevant articles can also be found on the blog regarding arbitration, dispute adjudication, mediation etc.

Our LinkedIn company page has steadily grown with more than 100 new followers. A special thanks to these followers for their interest to receive more.

Conclusion

Growth is continuing for this blog on contracts. The English language version is naturally drawing most attention. Besides, if sufficient interest exists, we will also continue with the French, Portuguese and Dutch versions. For the latter two, we seem to be filling a void, which is an extra motivation to serve these language communities (Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, the Netherlands, Belgium etc).

Please keep reading us! Bookmark us in your browser; follow us on our LinkedIn page or on Twitter; and, if you appreciate an article, please let us know by providing a “like” or a “comment” or “share” it with others.

You may also contact us to become a guest blogger. We have already benefited from contributions from Jean-Charles Savornin, “Contract Management: are contracts cast in stone?“, and Paul Netscher , “Negative cash flow for construction companies“.