Building on this, you can define the acceptance process around issuing of any deliverables resulting from the work, whether those are final reports, process flows etc. i.e. for the final report you could say in your SOW/engagement letter:Acceptance of a Deliverable occurs in accordance with the Acceptance Process. Acceptance Process = On the Delivery Date, the Consultancy will issue the Final Report to the Client by email. Subsequent to the Final Reports issue the Client shall review the report against and provide its written feedback to the Consultancy within 5 working days. The Consultancy shall within a further 3 working days incorporate such written feedback into the report and issue the Final Report to the Client, at this point the report shall be considered accepted. If the engagement has many deliverable then simply put them into table with the following column headings “Deliverable”, “Deliverable Description”, “Acceptance Process” and “Due Date” You will of course get into a discussion with the client about the wording. I’m sure all of us are capable of explaining why such an approach is valuable for the client, “we’ve based our price and delivery date on a series of assumptions. One of those assumptions is how our deliverables are reviewed and signed off by you. We’ve assumed that you will be the reviewer of our work.” If the client wants something else then you’re poised upfront to have the discussion on how if you have to develop the work to satisfy 20 stakeholders then that will have a time and price impact for the engagement. The discussion will then centre on the amount of time for review, you have an opportunity to describe what this will do for the price. I developed this approach when working with the MOD. We would submit our report and we’d be chasing it for 3 or more months and of course not getting paid in the meantime. Of course, there is no fool proof solution. However, this approach lets me have an early conversation with the client about expectations.
