Scope of Work: Key to Successful Offshore Business

Businesses gain profit and grow only when the product or service they offer to their clients/customers is of the highest quality. And similarly, all the effort that each and every member of your staffing business makes is to fill more positions each day. To ease the process, and help you reach your business goals, offshoring recruitment processes (candidate sourcing, resume formatting, admin support) helps; but the quality of the offshore engagement is heavily dependent on several factors and one of the key factors is ‘Scope of Work’.

Why do we need a Scope of Work Document?

For many of us, our work day starts with replying to emails and scheduling time for important meetings and other important business chores. And usually the day ends with a level of satisfaction on being able to accomplish scheduled tasks. Sometimes we face a breakdown to this usual mechanism due to complexity of the task or confusion over it; however, we sort it out by adding clarity to our scheduled tasks. Similarly, a scope of work document adds clarity to an offshore engagement helping both providers and the client to achieve their business goals.

Absence of proper Scope of Work

There has to be unadulterated clarity about the task to be performed through offshore process for it to culminate in a happy engagement. And this clarity depends upon how well the ‘Scope of Work’ is defined and agreed upon. Absence of a well-documented scope of project is often cited as a major reason for poor offshore engagement. In many of such cases, this document is prepared without any association or brain-storming with all the stakeholders, resulting in a narrowly put agreement where the work to be performed is hazily described.

What is missing in such SOW?

Such scope of work document lacks mention of milestones, key deliverables, interim and final reporting schedule and structure, and of course it lacks the perfect description of the end product/service as expected by the client along with a set timeline for all the listed elements. Additionally, people preparing scope of work document in absence of collaboration from other participating stakeholders get confused due on what elements to highlight and end up with writing statement of work.

How it impedes your business?

Lack of scope of work/project leads to uncontrolled development of product/services which generally do not meet the specific requirement of the client. Moreover, since the reporting schedule is also an intricate part of scope of work which is not properly defined in such cases, it results in abrupt discovery of flaws in product/service development lifecycle and at a stage where things have already soured. In occurrence of such events, the real goals of offshore engagements get jeopardized beyond repair and the projects are shut down.

What is the Solution?

However, being proactive and realizing the importance of scope of work document as a key factor towards success of offshore partnerships could save the day, both for the providers and the clients. It is needless to point out that the document so created should be refined with inputs of all the stakeholders from both the parties and should include enough checks to weed out unwanted delays and deviations from actual product/service development lifecycle. It is also important that both parties once agreed upon should honor it as the business code ensuring businesses achieve meaningful goals.

Originally published Dec 15, 2020 12:12:32, updated Jul 29 2024

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