Scope of work
A scope of work is the written definition of what a package or contract covers — the work a bidder is being asked to price.
Also written as SOW, scope.
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Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
It is assembled from the drawings, the specifications, and whatever instructions accompany the bid package. On a well-run project it also says explicitly where this package stops and the adjacent one starts.
There are usually two scopes in play, and confusing them causes most of the difficulty in comparison. There is the scope the general contractor issued, and there is the scope each subcontractor states in its own proposal. They are frequently not the same document and not the same list, and the second is the one that governs what the bidder has actually priced.
The clearer the issued scope, the less leveling there is to do. Most scope gaps can be traced back to a boundary that was never stated — not to a bidder behaving badly, but to two reasonable readings of the same silence.
- Bid package
A bid package is the bundle of scope issued to subcontractors as a single unit for pricing, usually corresponding to one trade.
- Scope gap
A scope gap is work required by the project that no bidder included in its price, because every bidder assumed someone else was carrying it.
- Exclusions
Exclusions are the items a bidder states are not included in its price.
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