1.  Purpose of this document

This document provides instruction to public sector contracting authorities using the Managed ICT Services Model Agreement (MISMA):  a simplified and shortened form of the pre-existing ICT Services Model Agreement (hereafter referred to as the "Model Agreement").

The specific aims of this paper are to:

a)  Outline MISMA's document-set and its relationship with other relevant material (Section 2).

b)  Describe the target application for users of MISMA (Section 3). If users are to apply the MISMA in the most effective way for their own application, it is important that they understand its target application and the key underlying assumptions (which if invalid may require the baseline MISMA to be modified).

c)  Describe how to make legitimate variations to tune the contract if the project under consideration does not fit the profile of the target application (Sections 4 and 5). Appropriate 'tuning' of the contract will help deliver fair and equitable deals and thereby minimise procurement costs and timescales and secure the best long term value for money.