Statement Of Work ( Sow ) - Gsa: Fill & Download for Free

In addition to the excellent answers here, it is useful to ask if the buyer has an Statement of Work already worked out. If not, don't offer to provide one, as that might require the buyer for a large organization to decline assistance. Just send them one. Make sure it's simple and to the point.

Many good answers about procuring hardware or systems. I’ll offer a perspective on procuring services.A typical RFP (request for proposals) for a military contract for services can easily be more than 100 pages long. The proposal in response can be dozens to hundreds of pages long. Depending on the size of the opportunity and the company size, it could take a month (sometimes more than a year) to develop that proposal. Multiply that times 10 or more bidders and imagine the cost that goes into the bidding process when only one company may win. The 9+ unsuccessful bidders incur significant overhead or B&P (bid and proposal) costs that ultimately get passed on to all government clients through indirect rates.Then one of the bidders files a protest with the agency or directly to GAO. The “apparent winner” is put on hold while the government investigates the merits of the protest. Six months or more may pass while all bidders wait to learn whether the protest is upheld or not. If it is upheld, the agency may be required to re-solicit the requirement and have everyone bid again. More costs. Sometimes there are repeat protests, two or three times.Okay, that is only on the bid process. I won’t even go into the marketing and selling costs which are significant given government contracting typically has 2 to 4-year sales cycles.Now, let’s assume you are the winning bidder. Now you have a contract with an often vague statement of work (SOW). The SOW is vague because the client isn’t really sure what they want. We will “figure it out as we go along...” In the old days, a software development project might start with a clear, well-written functional description and other requirements docs. Now, everyone wants agile development so let’s just start coding and figure out what we really want as we see prototypes developed. I’m not saying agile is bad, but it seems to fit a trend where the government doesn’t know what they want or they won’t spend the time to define requirements fully and just let the contractor struggle with writing a compliant proposal, then fumble around for several months to get to the real needs.Moving on to contracts and administrative compliance. Government contractors have to deal with a whole host of requirements that commercial companies do not. For any sizeable company, they must have a DCAA-compliant accounting system. I won’t bother to explain what that means, just that it requires detailed, auditable processes related to timekeeping, invoicing, and cost tracking - and the staff to back it up. Speaking of audits, expect at least a couple of audits per year that may take weeks of time from multiple staff members. Oh, and don’t forget to do your annual VETS reporting, ECMRA reporting, multiple Dept of Labor and/or Commerce business surveys, and other administrative actions. All of the staff needed to handle these administrative actions are overhead costs that get added to the cost of doing business with the government.How about security? Everyone knows security is important and commercial companies deal with that. But if your employees need a DoD security clearance - which can take a year or more - and you need a GSA-approved safe to store classified materials - and you need a facility security officer (FSO) to manage the process - those are all costs that commercial companies don’t have to deal with. And those costs are passed on to government clients - again, through indirect rates.Well, government contracting must be very lucrative if companies charge $400 for a hammer and $200/hour for a senior project manager - right? Not so much. The answers about hardware explain why the hammer costs so much. On the services side, by the time you add all of the administrative costs described above (and more), the cost of an employee to the government climbs to two to three times their salary. And only a small portion of that is “profit” for the company. In fact, profit is limited on many of our contracts to the 6–8% range. Commercial companies that price their products with 100–400% mark-ups cannot fathom what that is like. And recently, due to extreme competition, we have been asked by some of our prime contractor partners to lower our profit to 2% in order to win new business.But at least we collect that profit - right? Not so fast. The government likes to require a “fee retainage” on most contracts. You may get a 7% profit on a project, but the client requires you to withhold billing of 15% of the fee until the contract is closed out. That is their leverage to make sure you deliver all requirements. So on a $1M project, the company earns $70K of profit, but the gov’t holds back $10.5K until the contract is closed out. Well, if that is a one year project - no big deal, right? Wrong. Due to processing backlogs and delays in finalizing indirect rates and the typical bureaucracy - contract close-out can take 2–5 years after the project has ended! How would you like 15% of your pay withheld for years because your employer needed to ensure you did your work properly…?Those are just a few major things a layperson wouldn’t know about the military procurement of services. There are many others I could talk about, but suffice it to say that the terms “red tape” and “bureaucracy” are not over-exaggerated when it comes to government/military business.