In both my professional career and personal life, I’ve found myself working very frequently with SOWs and contracts. (Note that in this blog post, I will use the terms “SOW” and “contract” interchangeably.) But there was one specific time that I really gained some specific insight into this area. I was involved with an HOA, and this HOA had a variety of SOWs in place for various things: mowing the grass, cleaning the pool, fixing a fence, and so on. And I observed something interesting, in that there seemed to be two kinds of people:

Group A, that treat SOWs as a legally binding business agreement and thus tried to stay as aligned and informed as possible, and

Group B, that felt that SOWs were just a “piece of paper” and a formality, and the true business agreement came in the form of a firm handshake and a person’s word and integrity.

Now, if you are part of Group B, if your justification is that a SOW cannot properly manage all expectations on both sides, then I agree. You need a variety of other documents, processes, and communications to ensure that everyone is on the same page in terms of what is going to be done, and here is where that “firm handshake” can be useful. But this doesn’t mean that SOWs are not important. In fact, you still need to carefully read (and modify if necessary) the SOW for a very important reason, and that is, what if things go wrong? If it does, the SOW is what is going to be used to determine what happens. The SOW is essentially a risk management mitigation. So you need to make sure there is nothing in the SOW that defined something you aren’t expecting to happen, or something that you absolutely WANT to have happen isn’t missing.

For example, let’s say the pool suddenly has an algae outbreak, and you are wondering why your pool cleaner isn’t taking care of it. But you look in the SOW and suddenly see a line that says, “Not responsible for algae management, just weekly vacuuming.” It doesn’t matter what your expectation management was, the SOW states that the pool cleaner does not have to take care of the algae.

I propose an analogy. There are people who wear their seatbelt when they are in a car. All legal and experiential nuances aside, you wear your seatbelt as a form of risk management.

IF the car gets into an accident, THEN the seatbelt can help minimize your probability of injury.

There are people who have probably never gotten into a car accident, and thus they could make the argument that the seatbelt has never been needed by them. And in fact, they may go the entire rest of their lives without ever getting into an accident, so from their perspective the seat belt never served a useful purpose. But it has been pretty thoroughly proven that a seat belt is an effective safety tool and thus worth wearing.

So whether or not you think SOWs are useful, or just “formalities”, think of them as “seat belts for your contracts”. Take the time to read them and make sure that you understand all the details, otherwise if things go bad you might find yourself in a unexpected place.