Scope of work

Most specifications describe activity. Redesign the site, improve the funnel, modernise the stack. An activity has no end state, so there is nothing to be finished, and both sides sign it because it is agreeable — the disagreement is deferred to the point where it is expensive.

The way out is to write it in reverse. Start from how anybody will know it is done, which is the acceptance criteria, and let the scope be whatever is required to satisfy them. A specification written this way is usually shorter than one written forwards and is always harder to produce, because it forces the unresolved decisions into the open at the beginning.

Two sections earn their place and are almost always absent. What is explicitly out of scope, which prevents half the change orders. And who supplies what — content, access, decisions, sign-off — with dates, because the most common cause of a late project is not the supplier being slow, it is the buyer being the bottleneck and nobody having written down that they were on the critical path.

Specifying the solution instead of the outcome

A document that names the framework, the CMS and the page templates has decided the answer before anybody understood the question, and it transfers the risk to the buyer: the supplier delivered what was specified, and it does not do what was needed. Specify the outcome and the constraints, and let the supplier be accountable for the means — that is what you are paying them for.

Somebody will quote this number at you.

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.

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Reading a quotation for technical work

“The whole project comes to AED 45,000, four to six weeks.” · 30 minutes, 5 questions.

Acceptance criteria

The conditions that decide whether the work is finished — written before it starts, or they will be written afterwards to describe what arrived.

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Change order

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.

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Vendor selection and total cost

Judging a supplier on what the work costs over its life — including the rebuild — rather than on the quotation.

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Handover

The point at which a vendor's work becomes the company's property — defined by what is transferred, not by the project being finished.

All ninety-five termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

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.