By way of adding context—as someone who has only had the basic courses in the exciting world of federal contracting!—a statement of work is a detailed description of the work to be performed under a federal contract.
While, no doubt, a statement of work would be informed by discussions with a consultant who is a possible contractor, it also needs to be vendor-agnostic and focus on deliverables rather than methods, so that a variety of vendors might be able to perform the identified work by various methods and might therefore elect to compete for the contract. And identifying a number of possible vendors and having multiple discussions would also be expected (hence the request for information about vendors that others might have used).
The other main distinctive feature of the statement of work, in my understanding, is that the vendor can do only the work identified in the statement of work and the contracting agency can ask the vendor to do only that work. In the private sector, in my experience, if the work leads to another interesting area, the parties can rather informally agree to go ahead and include the additional work. Or, if it turns out that the original agreement is ambiguous, the organization hiring the vendor can clarify and elaborate the intention/requirement. But in federal contracting, only the work described in the statement of work can be performed, and the vendor can’t be asked to do something else/different if what they’ve done meets the description as written in the statement of work. That’s why it’s particularly important to have a clear and comprehensive statement of work, and to gain insight from others who have hired vendors to do similar work to try to make sure that everything important that should be done or might come up is included and adequately described in the statement of work.
Any insights or samples would, I am sure, be gratefully received.
My US$0.02 worth; the usual disclaimers apply.
Good luck!
Alan
Alan S. Hejnal
Data Quality Manager
Smithsonian Institution - Office of Advancement
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From: Advancement Services Discussion List <
FUNDSVCS@LISTSERV.FUNDSVCS.ORG> On Behalf Of Lidington, Siobhan
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2019 12:31 PM
To:
FUNDSVCS@LISTSERV.FUNDSVCS.ORG
Subject: Re: [FUNDSVCS] Statement of Work
Agree with Marianne. Do you mean an RFP maybe?
Siobhan Lidington
Director of Annual and Individual Giving
Pronouns: she, her, hers
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On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 8:44 AM Anissa Holmes <
00000044cfe70012-dmarc-request@listserv.fundsvcs.org<mailto:
00000044cfe70012-dmarc-request@listserv.fundsvcs.org>> wrote:
Good Morning,
We are looking for a sample statement of work to submit to a consulting firm to assess our prospect management and research shop. Does anyone have a sample they are willing to share? If you've already conducted an assessment, would you share which firm you used?
Feel free to reach me directly.
Thanks,
Anissa
Anissa Holmes
Director, Prospect Research | Office of Advancement | Smithsonian Institution
P: 202.633.4748 | Email:
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