Letter of Agreement (LOA) - Getting paid from the beginning

"Is there a signed Scope of Work (SOW)?" is one of the most frequently asked and important questions that comes up in an agency.

The competing needs listed below are among the most vexing, catch-22 components of a project's initiation phase:

• agencies need to have a signed SOW before starting work and committing resources
• the substantial amount of work and information required to develop a proper SOW
• clients need to know what they are buying before they sign off
  
• projects need to start quickly lest they go away or will not be finished on time
• client-side vetting and delays in getting a full-blown SOW approved

Enter the Letter of Agreement (LOA). This short document can be enough to satisfy both agency execs and clients alike that there is value on its way. The goal of the LOA is to quickly and painlessly establish that the agency, under the direction of the client, will carry out a preliminary set of activities and deliverables and will be compensated for all substantiated fees and costs incurred.

Additional parameters such as upper fee limits, general timing and deliverables can also be included if necessary. However, it's preferable to avoid these details or you will find yourself on the road to developing a bad SOW. Once you get sucked into this, it is easy to slip into project kick-off with no agreement signed.

To help move LOA approval along, it's worth pointing out to the client and that the agreement protects them with phrases like, "directed by the client" and "substantiated fees and costs". Including a statement in the LOA that a subsequent agreement, such as an SOW, will govern the final compensation terms, activities and deliverables, also helps mollify clients and agency execs.

I've been advised that these letters really don't have much legal bite, but that's not the point. The LOA is simply a tool to break through the typical project initiation impasse and prevent projects from starting with nothing in writing and ending without the agency being paid for all their efforts.

Issuing an LOA is the lesser of many evils. However, standing firm by not allowing a project to begin unless there is a signed SOW, when there is a hard deadline that can't move, isn't so great either. Just make sure you get around to issuing a proper SOW.

Kill the Post-Mortem

It's a commonly held best-practice to perform a Post-Mortem session following a project - especially one that doesn't go very well. I strongly support this practice and, along with teams I've worked with, have benefited considerably from them over the years.

One common risk with these, shall we say, charged events is that they become finger-pointing exercises (or chair-throwing if things really get out of hand). The typical objective is to generate actionable insights that improve the chance of success going forward. Obviously a certain amount of look-back is critical to the process but this should be done with an eye towards the future. To those ends, I've found the following to be helpful:

PRE-SESSION

• Do some info gathering w/a broad range of stakeholders.
  
• Identify areas to Sustain and areas to Improve. Including items to sustain helps keep a positive focus and is, of course, instructive.
  
• Capture the initial observations on a grid (see sample below) that lists project phases down the left and disciplines involved across the top (note the presence of the client) - you can even divide each cell into Sustain / Improve subcells.
  
• Use this info to help formulate your sense of what really happened and where you'd like to take the meeting.
  
• Don't shy away from your instincts and ideas about what happened and definitely have a strong notion of what positive outcomes will be for the meeting.
  
• Preview the grid and your ideas with a small number of key stakeholders and enlist their support around driving towards (not precisely at) your vision of positive outcomes.
  

SESSION

• Choose a person to facilitate the session. Common sense is your guide here: ideally someone who can work dispassionately and has the strength and intelligence to deal with, shall we say, "passion".
  
• Be clear about session objectives, desired outcomes, ground rules and keep a parking lot for issues that are not directly relevant or too deep for the scope of the meeting - you are not going to solve deeply rooted agency issues in this meeting.
  
• Distribute the grid and share your thoughts on its value and how you want it used (fill it in further, just a guide, etc).
  
• Allow for some venting, but keep the session moving.
  
• Many process or change management initiatives jump too quickly to detailed solutions - a shared vision of the way things should be is a prerequisite for changing the way things are.
  
• Recap findings and next steps.
  

POST SESSION

• Share outcomes w/broader team
  
• Publicly call out strong contributors
  
• Implement and educate about any changes to the organizations processes, tools and documentation (or FINALLY commit to creating them)
  
• Refer to the session as related issues (or the same damn ones) come up on other projects
  

KILL THE POST-MORTEM

Improvement is cyclical and iterative. The best way to avoid the tragedies that drive the need to conduct painful post-mortems, is to start out correctly in the first place (see: post on Project Initiation). Good Pre-Natal activities and health are the best way to avoid the slaughter that necessitates the Post-Mortem.

Document Management - Where is the latest version of xyz?

Not being able to find the soft copy (the latest version!) of a printed document is pretty high on the list of things at an agency that drive me nuts.

INSERT FILENAME & PATH!

To combat the effects of short, mid and long-term memory loss - effectively saving myself from myself, I have become reliant on inserting a field that dynamically generates the filename and path in the footer of all of my Microsoft Office documents. Combined with a proper file-naming convention, a "bread-crumb" path to the exact server or local hard-drive location of a document printed on the bottom of your document is invaluable. As far as I know, this doesn't work in PowerPoint, but as a bonus, it works like a charm in Microsoft Project.

I'm not going to go into detail on how to do this. It's easy enough to find out on the Microsoft site. As an example, you can find the instructions for Microsoft Word, in the Quick Reference Card on the Microsoft site.

If you've ever had the joy of updating a document from an older version, while a deadline or your boss is looming, you will agree that taking the time to include this in your and your team's SOP is worth the effort. The job you save may be your own.