Wikipedia defines the Statement Of Work (SOW) as "a formal document that captures and defines the work activities, deliverables, and timeline a vendor must execute in performance of specified work for a client". However, this definition misses out a very crucial phrase - "high-level"
An SOW is usually signed at the beginning of a project, when the IT vendor does not have a clear idea of the client's requirements, beyond what their Sales team has captured. And since most IT Sales folks are non-technical, what they state in the SOW are purely business requirements
When these get translated into technical requirements, we may end up with a completely different picture of the task complexity and practical timeline. However, having already signed off on an SOW with ambigously worded requirements, the IT vendor is unable to dispute any scope creep
Therefore an SOW needs to clearly state that the deliverables and timeline mentioned are at a high-level and subject to change during the system analysis & design phase. Ambiguous requirements should be highlighted as such, so that the client cannot interpret them to suit their own interest
Thus an SOW is an agreement to start a project, comprising of some high-level requirements, and to complete it by providing some high-level deliverables in some high-level timeline. The elaboration of these should be left to another project management document, namely the SRS document
Educate Sales people to join Business analyst related call so that they can understand the way technical analyst think and interpret their requirement , or their requirement while transformed into technical terms take what shape.
ReplyDeleteThis way Sales people at least get a glims of terminology IT expert use so that the crucial part ot business requirement will not get missed out or hang in here and there with some valuable time being wasted.
:) this though is very tough in terms of technical team showing patience to ans or make Sales team understand the discussion but not impossible
I am now handling some work related to SOW...on learning curve..hope will comment soon on this!!!
ReplyDeleteI Agree. But I don't think a sales personnel should be expected to provide more than 'high-level' requirements. It's not his domain and it's best left to the PM and the technical team to "progressively elaborate!"
ReplyDeleteThere have been times when over-enthusiastic (or over-burdened depending on how you look at it) Sales people add technical specs which may not be entirely correct and this leads to re-work for the project team. The SOW is just the starting point for the project to be authorized and it's best left to that.
I agree with Shadaan. @Gaurav: Sales people should stick to giving high-level requirements only, so that they can concentrate on what they do best, which is building the pipeline
ReplyDelete