Reaping what you SOW: Guidelines and strategies for writing scopes of work for statistical consulting

Abstract

Statistical consulting has the potential to be remarkably rewarding or frustratingly fruitless. Attentive and careful execution of a statistical scoping process will yield top-caliber research and collaborative partnerships. We provide guidelines and strategies for how to write effective statistical scopes of work (SOWs) and build this procedure into a statistical consulting workflow, using illustrative case studies along the way. Effective SOWs provide a solid foundation on which to build fruitful research partnerships, to avoid common pitfalls and to weather turbulent situations successfully.