The people furthest from the document
The person who originates a piece of work and the person who carries its risk are usually not the same person. Services procurement is built on that separation, and it is where the trouble accumulates.
A hiring manager needs work done. They describe it, bring in a supplier, sign a SoW that was largely the supplier's draft. They are close to the work and far from the contract. Months later a question arrives about worker classification, about whether the people delivering were a genuine supplier team or contractors in all but name. That question does not land on the manager. It lands on HR, who never saw the document and inherited the exposure anyway. Microsoft Research, studying knowledge workers and AI, found that confidence in a fluent draft correlates with less scrutiny of it. A SoW that reads well gets waved through, and classification is exactly the kind of risk a well-read draft conceals.
The mechanism is bespoke authoring. When every manager writes their own engagement from scratch, the classification question gets answered ad hoc, differently each time, by people not equipped to answer it, or not answered at all. The exposure is created at the point of authorship and discovered at the point of audit, by a different function entirely.
Routing every SoW through HR for approval creates a bottleneck that work quietly routes around. Putting the classification question inside the document, as a field the originator has to complete, names the exposure at the moment the engagement is created, by the person creating it, on the record.
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. Engagement type and personnel basis become fields the originator completes, not a risk HR discovers later.
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.