Sample deliverable
Sample pilot scope
The statement of work for a six week supervised pilot: schedule, deliverables, acceptance criteria and exclusions.
This is a sample scope, not an offer.
The parties, the systems and the volumes are placeholders. The six week schedule, the six deliverables, the exclusions and the decision gate are the ones we would actually sign.
The statement of work for a six week supervised pilot, in the form it is signed. Names, systems and volumes change from one engagement to the next. The schedule, the deliverables, the exclusions and the decision gate do not.
This is a sample, not an offer. Every clause is one we would sign, but a real scope is written against a real workflow after a scoping call. Read it as the shape of the document rather than as terms.
Illustrative example
1. Parties
| Supplier | NorthCape Technology, Victoria, Australia. |
|---|---|
| Client | The organisation named in the signature block. |
| Engagement lead | A NorthCape founder, named at signature. The person who scopes the work is the person who builds it. |
| Client sponsor | One named person with authority to sign off the baseline and make the week 6 decision. Required. A pilot without a sponsor does not start. |
| Term | Six weeks from the kick-off date, extendable only by written agreement. |
2. Objective
To establish, on the client's own workflow and the client's own volumes, whether a supervised agent produces a measurable improvement worth deploying. The pilot is designed so that a clear no is as useful an outcome as a clear yes, and is delivered as promptly.
3. Workflow in scope
One workflow. The single workflow named at signature, measured end to end. This is the most frequently negotiated clause in the document and it is the one we hold, because a pilot spread across three workflows measures none of them well enough to decide anything.
- The workflow is described in an appendix agreed before kick-off, at the level of individual steps.
- The systems the agent will read from and write to are named, with one named owner each.
- Any step that must remain with a person is identified before the build starts, not after.
4. Baseline: definition and capture
The baseline is the whole pilot. Without it, week 5 produces an impression rather than a measurement, and the week 6 decision gets made on how everyone felt about the demonstration.
What is captured
- Volume. The count of work items over a stated period, taken from the client's own system of record.
- Handling time. A timed sample of work items, measured end to end by the people who do the work.
- Loaded hourly cost. Supplied by the client. NorthCape does not estimate this figure.
- Quality reference. Where an error or rework rate already exists, it is recorded. Where none exists, that is recorded too, and no quality claim is made in week 6.
How it is captured
- In week 1, before anything is built, so the measurement cannot be shaped by the solution.
- A minimum sample of 30 work items, or a full week of volume where weekly volume is lower than that.
- Timed by the team doing the work, using a start and stop stamp, not reconstructed from memory or from timesheets.
- Signed off in writing by the client sponsor at the end of week 1. The build does not start until it is signed.
If the baseline cannot be captured, the pilot stops in week 1 and the fee is refunded less the days worked. That is a better outcome than five more weeks of work nobody can evaluate.
5. Schedule and deliverables
| Week | Focus | Deliverable | Client input required |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Baseline | Baseline record and measurement plan. Volume, timed sample, loaded cost, quality reference, and the method that will be repeated in week 5. | Access to the system of record. Roughly 3 hours from the team being measured. |
| 2 | Design | Solution design and data boundary note. The agent's steps, the systems it touches, what runs alone, what waits for approval, where it runs, which models it uses and what is retained. | One 90 minute design session. Written sign-off on the data boundary. |
| 3 | Build | Working agent in a non-production environment with test data, and with the approval gates and the exception routing configured. | Test credentials and a sample of realistic work items. |
| 4 | Supervised run | Supervised run log and exception register. Every action the agent took on live work, who approved it, and every exception with its reason and resolution. | A named supervisor, roughly 4 hours across the week. |
| 5 | Measure | Post-deployment measurement taken with the identical method and at least the sample size used in week 1. | The same team, timing the same way. Roughly 3 hours. |
| 6 | Report and decide | Pilot report and deployment recommendation. Baseline, delta, what was not counted, exception rate, a fixed price deployment option and a plain recommendation. | One 60 minute decision meeting with the sponsor. |
Six deliverables, one a week. Each is a document or a running artefact the client keeps, whatever the week 6 decision turns out to be.
6. Acceptance criteria
Acceptance is against the deliverables, not against the result. An agent that demonstrably does not help is still a delivered pilot, because that answer is what was bought. Tying acceptance to a saving would give NorthCape an incentive to report one.
| Deliverable | Accepted when |
|---|---|
| Baseline record | The sponsor signs that the volume, the timed sample and the loaded cost describe the work as it is done today. |
| Solution design | The sponsor signs the data boundary, and every automated step and every approval gate is listed. |
| Working agent | The agent completes the workflow on test data, exceptions route to the named person, and no approval gate can be bypassed. |
| Supervised run log | Every live action is logged and attributable, and every exception has a recorded reason and resolution. |
| Measurement | The method matches week 1 and the sample is at least as large. |
| Pilot report | It states the delta, what was not counted, the exception rate and a recommendation, and the sponsor can trace every figure to a source. |
7. Exclusions
Not included in the pilot fee, and quoted separately if wanted.
- Any workflow other than the one named at signature.
- Production deployment, production hosting and ongoing running costs.
- Integration with a system that has no documented API, no supported export, or no available test environment.
- Data migration, data cleansing and any remediation of existing records.
- Changes to the client's own processes, policies or document templates.
- Training beyond a single handover session for the supervising team.
- Licences, subscriptions and infrastructure charged by third parties.
- Security questionnaires beyond one, and any certification, external audit or penetration test.
- On-premises deployment of a private model, which is a separate scoping exercise.
- Support, monitoring or an availability commitment. A pilot is not a production service and carries no service level.
8. Commercial terms
| Fee | From $5,000 plus GST, fixed at signature for the scope in this document. |
|---|---|
| Payment | Half on signature, half on delivery of the week 6 report. Fourteen day terms. |
| What moves the fee above the floor | More than two source systems, an integration without a documented API, an on-premises model requirement, or a security review beyond a single questionnaire. Any of these are priced before signature, never after. |
| Change control | Any change to the workflow in scope is a written variation with its own fee and its own effect on the schedule. |
| Deployment | Quoted in the week 6 report as a fixed price for this workflow at production volume. There is no obligation to proceed. |
| Expenses | None. Travel within Victoria is not charged. |
| Termination | Either party may end the pilot in writing at any time. The client pays for days worked and keeps every deliverable completed to that point. |
9. Intellectual property
- The client owns its own data, its documents, its templates and its process knowledge. Nothing in this document changes that.
- The client receives a perpetual, irrevocable licence to use the agent configuration, the prompts and the rules built during the pilot, for its own business.
- NorthCape retains its pre-existing platform, tooling and general methods. Those are not created by the pilot and are not transferred by it.
- Nothing the client supplies is used to train any model.
- Neither party names the other publicly without written permission. NorthCape may describe the work anonymously, by sector and workflow, unless the client asks it not to.
10. Data and confidentiality
- Where the agent runs, which models it uses and what is retained are set in the week 2 design and written into this scope by variation.
- Australian hosting is available for every deployment option and is the default unless the client asks otherwise.
- Access is limited to the named engagement team, is granted by the client, and is revocable by the client at any time.
- Application logs are retained for 90 days. Prompts and outputs are not retained by the model provider.
- On termination, client data held by NorthCape is returned or deleted at the client's election within 30 days.
- Full detail sits in the security and procurement pack, which forms part of this scope.
11. Decision gate
Week 6 ends in one of three outcomes, recorded in writing. There is no fourth outcome in which the pilot quietly continues.
| Outcome | What it means | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy | The measured delta justifies the deployment cost and the exception rate is acceptable. | The client accepts the fixed price deployment quote in the week 6 report. |
| Extend | The result is genuinely unclear, usually because volume in the measurement window was atypical. | A written variation adds a defined measurement period at a stated fee. Available once. |
| Stop | The agent does not improve the workflow enough to be worth deploying. | The engagement ends. The client keeps the baseline, the design, the run log and the report, and owes nothing further. |
12. Signatures
Signed for the client:
Signed for NorthCape Technology:
Name and position on the first line of each pair, signature and date on the second. This document takes effect on the later of the two dates.
The next step
The exclusions are the honest part. Read them, then decide.
If section 7 rules out the thing you actually need, you have saved yourself a call. If it does not, the scoping call is where this document gets your workflow written into it.