July 2013

Monthly Archives

  • Acceptance and Completion Criteria

    The Difference Between Acceptance and Completion Criteria in a SOW (View of a SaaS Attorney)

    SOWAs a SaaS attorney, I have been running into this issue a lot recently, so I thought it warranted a blog post.  What is the difference between acceptance criteria and completion criteria in a SOW, and why should you care? Well, there are many differences — with significant consequences — and you definitely should care. Let’s go through it.

    Acceptance Criteria. While this has many flavors of this concept in SaaS implementations, you usually see it drafted (by the customer) and it says something like “subject to acceptance” or “customer can accept, review and test the deliverables…” (i.e. a subjective measurement). The customer usually says something like, we need to check that what you deliver meets our requirements.(By the way, there are actually two flavors of customer acceptance wording–see chart below)

    Completion Criteria. This is a different way of addressing the same issue.  It is an objective measurement (i.e. not subject to distortions by prejudices or interpretations) of did you, for example ‘deliver’ the report to the customer or ‘hold’ the training session call.  Said another way, this is something you can prove or demonstrate, and is not subject to the interpretation or opinion of the customer of whether it was done or not.

    Why should I care?  As a SaaS attorney, I suggest you should care, as if you want to get paid, or are worried about …