Statement of Work

Due process is a pivotal aspect of personnel management, particularly within the public school environment in which I am currently employed at a middle school in Brooklyn, New York. This issue is oftentimes complicated by current tenure laws within the State of New York, a number of which have recently come under intense public scrutiny. This document will explore the nature of due process and some of the legislation relating to tenured and non-tenured individuals within New York through the means of a case study.

The case study is applicable to anywhere, yet will be examined within this document as though these people and events took place at the aforementioned school at which I am employed. The crux of the case study is that I am a principal at this learning institution in which there is an effective, yet somewhat rogue teacher who is accused by the parents of a student of discriminating against her. After learning that Julia's parents want to file a discrimination case against Mrs.

Wright, Julia's teacher, it is necessary for me to gather the names and contact information for Julia's parents as well as for me and the school in which I am employed, the name and occupation of Mrs. Wright and her place of employment, the nature of the particular claim for discrimination and the stratification in which it should be placed (pertaining to drugs Julia imbibed), and any relevant witnesses.

I would send this information to both the New York State Department of Labor and to the school district in which the school is located. It is necessary to follow up with the district in regards to whether or not Julia's parents will desire a hearing; it is also advantageous for the witnesses to issue statement in writing regarding their perspective on the matter. 2) After the hearing was conducted and it was determined that Mrs.

Wright is not guilty of discriminating against Julia and if I were to look through Wright's personnel file, I would greatly expect to see information in accordance with this definition of discrimination: "discrimination occurs when you are treated differently in a way that causes an adverse impact to you, based on your: race, gender, age, disability, religion, national origin…" (New York, 2014). Thus, I would be prepared to see records for Mrs.

Wright which did not involve the operative part of the aforementioned definition, "in a way that causes adverse impact." It is clear that Wright treated Julia differently, however, the investigation revealed that such differential treatment did not adversely affect Julia. Therefore, I would expect to see records that reflected this fact. Some of Mrs. Wright's non-discriminatory behavior is constitutional. For instance, her airs of superiority and complaining about the school board are constitutional.

Still, I would ensure that she fully adhere to Julia's accommodations under the threat of punitive measures -- particularly for a non-tenured instructor. If she was tenured, I would still emphasize that it is her job to adhere to Julia's accommodations, and would threaten her with a different incompetence hearing if she did not follow suit. 3) The consequences that Wright could face were she found guilty of discrimination include getting fired, as well as becoming subject to both criminal and civil litigation against her.

Teachers who have tenure in New York State can certainly lose their jobs if they break a law. Discrimination of those "in state agencies that provide services" (New York, 2014) which public school teachers do, are transgressing the law when they engage in discriminatory actions. As a non-tenured teacher Mrs. Wright has substantially fewer rights than a tenured one. She would have the right to a hearing -- if found guilty she could lose her job.

Those rights would differ for a tenured teacher in that he or she would have to get suspended during the duration of the hearing, and he or she might still not be eligible to lose his or her job even after the outcome of the hearing was decided (NYSED, 2012). A statement of work (SOW) is a document that identifies all of the key information regarding a project or a job that one party wants another to do.

Such a document provides key parameters regarding the way that the work is expected to be completed. A SOW does not necessarily convey to another party how it should perform a certain job. Oftentimes, details regarding technology, those who will actually work on it, and other aspects of implementing a SOW are left to the party that is completing the job or specified through a contract SOW. A project SOW, however, provides the parameters to which the party conducting the work must adhere.

Frequently these parameters involve the time frame for completion, the time frame for which certain components of the job are required, aspects of the governance process, and anything else that the hiring party expects the working party to do. It is critical to note that virtually anything not explicitly written in a project SOW or contract SOW is subject to the choice of the laborer, which is why it is pivotal to make a SOW as detailed and as comprehensive as possible.

One of the key components of a SOW is the price and the way in which the receiving party will obtain its remuneration. Both parties must agree upon the price before the work is completed; it is best for them to come to an agreement about this issue prior to the work's beginning. Additionally, it is also beneficial to the party issuing the statement of work to deliver payment on a project basis pertaining to specific components of its completion.

It is frequently unacceptable to the receiving party to wait until the entire work is finished before receiving payment; most often there are payments that are made during the actual laboring process. Doing so helps to ensure that the receiving party is actually doing the work it is supposed to do according to the SOW, and that the paying party is actually comfortable with the quality of work that the other party is doing. There are a couple of key points of distinction between a SOW and a contract SOW.

The former applies to the entire project as a whole that two parties are agreeing upon. As such, it is the first document that is drafted and is present at the beginning of the agreement between the two parties.

A SOW is actually one of the many different facets of the project management process; it is the critical input involved in achieving what is referred to as the Develop Project Charter, which is one of the initial processes in the project management and in the agreement reached between two parties embarking on a project. Thus, the general or project SOW is much more comprehensive than a contract SOW, the latter of which is derived after the former and is partly based on information in the former document.

Furthermore, it is pivotal to remember that a contract SOW provisions a description of services, products, and deliverables that pertain to a specific contract that applies to the services, products and deliverables that are written in the project SOW. Part of the need for a contract SOW is derived from one of the points made on the previous page regarding the specificity of a project SOW, and the license that the supplying party has in supplying its services.

Quite simply, in issuing deliverables to a customer, there are certain things which a purveyor would prefer to purchase rather than specifically tailor make for a customer.

Within the realm of data management and information technology, for example, the provider of a Cloud business intelligence platform may choose to host its service through a popular Cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services as opposed to hosting all of an organization's data itself -- which leads to inherent questions about security and governance which are not necessarily related to its provisioning of an analytics solution.

In these instances there is a contract SOW created so that the each party is aware of what services or goods the purveyor will pay for and not directly provide itself. Thus, the contract SOW functions as a subset of the project SOW. Within the entirety of the project management process, the former is one of the outputs of the process known as acquisitions and plan purchases.

Whereas the project SOW is for the entire project, the "statement of work (SOW) for each contract is developed from the project statement of work, the project work breakdown structure (WBS), and WBS dictionary" (The Project Management Institute, 2004, p. 280). It is critical to note that contract SOWs only apply to those areas of a project that are not completed internally from the seller of services. They are necessary so that the buyer of services can still dictate how those services that are not directly stemming from an organization are rendered.

There are a number of reasons why it is important for contract SOW agreements. On the one hand, they are a means of helping to regulate critical aspects of cost and the time in which deliverables are presented. On the other hand, they are vital means of ensuring that there is quality assurance of those deliverables.

By denoting how and where the seller is to get those aspects of deliverables that are not internal, the buyer of services is able to issue its approbation or lack thereof based on where those deliverables are procured from. More importantly, contract SOW agreements are an integral means by which the buyer is able to effect its control and consent throughout the entire project management process -- even in those areas that extend beyond the organization that is selling its services to the buyer.

The best example of a contract SOW was alluded to earlier in this document in the case in which the buyer is an organization that relies on data driven processes to enhance and achieve its business objectives. The seller is any variety of third-party vendors that provide analytics solutions via the Cloud. For the sake of this example, the seller will be RapidMiner, a predictive analytics vendor whose most efficacious solutions utilize cloud computing.

In this particular example, RapidMiner has found a start-up customer which wants more than to simply purchase one of the company's Cloud analytics products. It wants to employ the company and its CEO, Ingo Mierswa, to actually create its IT department including all of its infrastructure, architecture, hardware and software. The company is a retail company which is looking to utilize predictive analytics.