IT Project Management Using the Statement of Work

Projects  fail or succeed based on whether they meet (or are perceived to meet) success criteria. In most cases, the criteria of success are subjective, and the parties to a project can easily develop their own interpretations of both the nature of the work and what that work is to accomplish. The project manager has the primary responsibility of defining these items up-front so all parties can understand and agree on them; then, the project manager must continue to manage the expectations of his or her stakeholders and project team through constant communication.

Both these responsibilities require a baseline document of record and point of reference; such a document is the statement of work, or SOW. The text that follows describes the SOW, its most likely manifestations, its place in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), and its typical components.

A Foundational Tool

The SOW is a foundational tool in project management and it encompasses the majority of the domains of a project: scope, schedule, resource, inputs, outputs, and so forth. A well-designed SOW can make a project a success, whereas a poorly designed SOW can result in the labeling of a project  as a failure, no matter how successfully the work was completed. The SOW is an agreement among all project stakeholders on what the work is, how and when …