are your contracts full of loopholes?
Great Contracts or Grief?
Everyone from Sales through to Operations benefits from well written Statements of Work.
A few years ago, while working on a large transformation project, I attended weekly stakeholder meetings where members of our project delivery team would sit down around a large conference table and meet with client representatives.
The agenda was supposed to be focused on reviewing the collective team’s recent accomplishments and review open issues.
The meetings however, frequently descended into rant sessions delivered by the client reps. Those weekly meetings felt more like attending a Festivus celebration (any Seinfeld fans out there?) than developing mitigation strategies to move the project forward. The ‘airing of grievances’ would consume the entire hour and destroyed team morale.
Initially, my colleagues and I would leave the meetings tired, stressed and deflated. We wondered where was all this animosity coming from?
And then I had a conversation over lunch with one of the client’s project managers. She shared with me her management team’s expectations of the project. What struck me between the eyes was the client’s interpretation of the statement of work (SOW) governing the project.
The gap between the our sales team’s intent in writing the SOW and the client’s interpretation was significant. Each team assumed the other was focused on the same objectives. However our sights were clearly focused on different targets.
The results of these assumptions, different perspectives were felt every painful meeting.
A course correction was needed and it began with both leadership teams getting into a room to collectively review the agreement and level set the deliverables, schedule, approach, invoicing and payment terms.
Once re-aligned, we were finally able to begin building relationships across both teams. The weekly floggings subsided and forward momentum was generated.
The positive impacts were felt across both organizations.
Which brings me back to the point of this post. Spend the time up front when crafting a statement of work. Dive into the nitty gritty details. Review those details with your customer and make sure everyone around the table has the same understanding of the deliverables. If there’s any doubt, add a glossary of terms.
If you don’t, you’ll feel like you’re in the movie Groundhog Day, regularly celebrating Festivus – you can save the ‘feats of strength’ for after the project is done.
