A SOW (Statement of Work) is an important part of both project and contract management that helps guarantee that the work for a project will be done according to certain guidelines and expectations.
Contractors or collaborators outside your organization will use the SOW to guide their work during a specific project.
An effective SOW will include work details, schedules, terms and expected outcomes, so it’s imperative that it’s done correctly and doesn’t leave anything out.
An SOW can be used for a wide variety of projects, ranging from a single visual design made by a graphic artist for a client, to a large-scale government building contract.
One trend that organizations need to watch for is the shifting transparency associated now with SOW due to the pandemic. The pandemic has highlighted the breadth of the extended workforce associated with SOW engagements and suppliers to a greater degree than ever before.
With many firms facing a need to review resourcing expenditure, attention was turned by many almost overnight to services spend and where budgets were being used. While this desire for greater transparency has certainly been growing across total workforce solutions for some time now, it has really picked up for SOW in particular.
This is occurring at the same time that many organizations are refining their buying strategies to emphasize deliverables-based purchasing over standard time and materials solutions.
With attention focused on the external workforce, a number of businesses identified gaps in information that they have taken action to close, which has certainly been encouraging from our perspective.
Keeping track of the full-time, permanent resources that are employed by the company is much easier than implementing the same tracking for the external workforce.
And while there are, of course, technology tools available to track and store this data, the ability to do something with these statistics is a completely different skill that needs to really be honed over the coming months.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers SOW Writing Training, a 2-day course that provides participants with concepts, tools, approaches, and configuration of Statement of Work.
Additionally, Tonex offers over five dozen other courses in Business Skills. Training covers everything from business writing and briefing skills to SOW Writing and Risk Management. Here are just a few of our courses in Business Skills:
Strategic Planning and Management Training (3 days)
Time Management and Organizational Skills (2 days)
Writing for Engineers, Scientists and Technical Managers (2 days)
Scope Management and Baseline Development (2 days)
Conflict Management Training (1 day)
Corporate Social Responsibility Training (2 days)
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.