Buying and accepting
The written record that scope moved and what it now costs — and in the UAE, the thing without which the extra work is not billable.
Also called Variation · Дополнительное соглашение
Scope moves on every engagement and the movement is not the problem. The problem is that it is agreed on a call, because raising paperwork mid-project feels adversarial and everybody is getting on well. Two versions of the truth follow, both sincerely held, and the more expensive one belongs to whoever kept better notes.
In the UAE the informality cuts in a particular direction. Under the civil code a contractor cannot claim for additional scope unless the client authorised it and the increase was agreed — so a supplier delivering unrequested extras is working for nothing, and a client accepting them without a record has a defence they may not have realised they had. Neither party is usually aware of this while it is happening.
The mechanism worth having is small: a numbered record naming what changed, what it costs, what it does to the date, and a reply. An email thread with a reply is a record. A conversation is not.
Each one is genuinely minor and none is worth the friction of a document. Collectively they are the overrun, and because none was recorded there is no way to show where the time went — so the conversation at the end is about the supplier being slow rather than about scope having moved five per cent a week. Record them even when nobody is charging for them; the log is the evidence.
Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.
- Writing a specification you can accept work against
- “Here is the brief. Redesign the site, improve the funnel, modernise the stack.” · 60 minutes, 5 questions.
- Reading a quotation for technical work
- “The whole project comes to AED 45,000, four to six weeks.” · 30 minutes, 5 questions.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.