The 40% problem

Forty percent of project disputes trace back to scope. Not price, not timing, not supplier competence. The parties did not agree on what was being delivered. World Commerce and Contracting found this by studying where disputes actually originate, and the figure has stayed consistent across sectors and years.

The instinct is to read that as a drafting-quality problem, as though better writers would close the gap. They would not. The gap is structural. When a scope is authored fresh for each engagement, it becomes a novel description of work, and a novel description has never been read by anyone who later has to deliver it, price it, or argue about it. It reads cleanly in the room and means two different things the moment it leaves.

A financial services firm engaged a consultancy to review and improve customer onboarding. Five words. The consultancy read "review," produced an assessment, and invoiced. The buyer read "improve," expected a working process, and refused to pay. Both positions were defensible, because the scope had been written to sound complete rather than to be specific. The dispute was sitting inside the word "improve" from the day it was signed.

This was not a bad supplier or a careless buyer. It was a bespoke document doing what bespoke documents do: carrying an ambiguity nobody priced, because nobody had seen this exact scope before. Multiply that across a portfolio and you arrive at the 40%.

The instinct behind most weak SoWs is to write each one fresh. Every freshly authored scope is a novel document that no one has reviewed, priced, or tested against delivery, and that novelty carries a commercial cost the buyer rarely sees until it arrives. The standard inverts the instinct. It begins from a baseline the enterprise has already approved, eleven sections and fifty-one elements, and permits variation only where the work genuinely differs. The schema turns that structure into data, the substrate AI needs to extract obligations, score risk, and govern a portfolio, rather than generate one more unreviewed draft. A scope drawn from an approved baseline cannot smuggle "improve" past a field that asks how acceptance is measured.

The launch

statementofwork.org launches on 10 August at the World Commerce and Contracting APAC Summit in Sydney. The full standard and engagement types, and the first learning and certification modules go live the same day. You signed up before any of it was public, which means you see it first.