This past week I had cause to make a scope of work for a client from scratch, which is something I don’t get to do very often. I figured I could blog the process just to document it, though I’m not going to share any examples from the actual SOW I made — just outlines.
I actually had a scope of work that I’d made back in 2022 (!) available in Google Drive, which I only remembered existed by coincidence. But it was a nice find, because it meant that I could reuse all of the formatting work I’d done previously, even if all the content had to be jettisoned. I could also build off the structure of the old one/scrap or add parts as needed.
The overall structure was:
- Title
- Contextual information
- the client’s institution
- the name & title of the person I’m preparing it for
- my name & title
- the date
- Overview (context section that goes sort of broadest to narrowest on detail – the name of the product/service and what the client’s needs are, then info on the product/service and how it will meet those needs)
- Work Breakdown (specific steps that will happen in order to provide the product/service – both what we’re responsible for & what the client will need to do)
- If I need to give a specific explanation of why a step has to happen a certain way, I’ll do it here, but I try to keep it short
- Mode of delivery, if there’s specific deliverables
- Hours required for a service, if a certain step needs it
- This bit got split into multiple sections for the SOW I made, because there were multiple things the client wanted & each one had different things that needed to happen
- Costs Breakdown (a table of costs with the following columns):
- Unit type
- # of units
- Item/description
- Unit price
- Total item price
In other SOWs I could probably include a specific work timeline or relevant history between Reclaim and the client, or other information if it’s needed, but it wasn’t for this.
The other important thing was a sanity check. I ran this by Taylor, Amanda and Jim, and they noticed some big changes that needed making (Taylor in particular found a point where I was seriously overcomplicating things!)
I found the process pretty fun! Drafting this kind of thing from scratch doesn’t come up all that much, but somehow it feels like helping to create something totally new, which is just plain cool.
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