[ritchiea]

Question for other freelancers: how do you handle changes in a spec?

I've been nervous about this lately because I'm doing freelance work and the contract outlined a spec that we've now deviated from greatly. I'm not incredibly worried because we do bi-weekly billing but do you regularly ask clients to revise contracts if the spec changes?

And when you begin a contract, what level of specificity in a spec is a good idea? Obviously some level of specificity is a must, but an overly detailed contract leaves you in the position I described above where the contract does not actually describe the work in progress.

[tptacek]

There are two different functional components of a contract; the "terms" and the "statement of work" (SOW). They're often combined in a single "standard contractor agreement" with a fill-in-the-blanks "SOW exhibit", but just as often you have a distinct master agreement with terms and a SOW for each project.

The SOW is responsible for laying out what work you're going to do. If a changing spec is a project risk, a typical consultant response to that would be to build some of the spec language into the SOW, so that if the spec changes in a way that materially harms your ability to complete the project, you have recourse with the client.

The typical best case scenario for spec slips on projects is a client that extends the contract to account for them, and a somewhat rigorous SOW is a good tool for making that happen.

[sard420]

We basically wrote up what we called a change order. Detailed how we changed, or what we deviated on. Signed by both parties as just a cya sort of deal.