Working Agreement Template
The one-page document that anchors the deployment. Why it exists, what goes in it, the template itself, and the protocol for getting it signed.
Why a working agreement
Most FDE-DE deployments don't fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because the customer and the platform team had different unspoken expectations about what would ship, when, and how it would be measured. The working agreement surfaces those unspoken expectations and writes them down.
Three forcing functions it provides:
- Forces scope clarity. Writing "in scope" and "out of scope" explicitly makes the customer realize they didn't actually agree on it.
- Forces success criteria. "Renewal alerts within 7 days of due date for 95% of MSAs" is testable. "Better renewal visibility" is not.
- Forces escalation paths. Naming who owns what and when to escalate means you don't have to renegotiate it in a crisis.
It's not a contract — your AE owns the contract. It's a working artifact for the team running the deployment. Both sides refer back to it when something looks off.
The shape
One page. Markdown or Google Doc. Signed off by the customer's executive sponsor and your team lead. Nine sections:
- Objective — one sentence, business outcome.
- In scope — specific document classes, use cases, output targets.
- Out of scope — what you're not doing. Equally important.
- Success criteria — measurable, with thresholds.
- Timeline — week-by-week first month, monthly thereafter.
- Owners — both sides, including escalation routes.
- Kill criteria — what triggers a pause or reshape.
- Reporting cadence — Friday status, monthly leadership review.
- Sign-off — names + date.
The template
# [Customer] × [Platform] — Working Agreement
Version 1.0 · Effective YYYY-MM-DD · Review monthly
## 1. Objective
One sentence. Business outcome, not technical output.
Example: "Surface upcoming agreement renewals 90 days in advance so the
procurement team can renegotiate before notice deadlines, reducing
auto-renew lock-ins."
## 2. In scope
Specific. Listed.
- Document classes: [MSA, SOW, NDA, supplier agreements]
- Source systems: [DocuSign CLM, SharePoint /contracts folder]
- Output targets:
- Snowflake schema `prod.contract_intel.*`
- Looker dashboards: Renewal Pipeline, Spend Coverage
- Email digest to procurement leadership every Monday
- Time period covered: agreements active or signed within last 3 years
- Geographic scope: US + UK entities
## 3. Out of scope
What we're explicitly NOT doing.
- ERP writeback to SAP (separate Phase 2 conversation)
- Real-time / event-driven updates (daily batch is the baseline)
- Pre-2022 documents (corpus quality below SLA)
- Non-English documents (Phase 2 if value demonstrated)
- Renegotiation workflow / e-signature integration
## 4. Success criteria
Measurable. With thresholds. Per use case.
- **Renewal alerts**: 95% of MSAs flagged ≥ 90 days before their
earliest notice deadline.
- **Extraction accuracy** (per document class, rolling 30-day audit
on 100-document sample):
- MSA fields (parties, effective_date, renewal_term): ≥ 95%
- SOW fields (value, term, deliverables): ≥ 92%
- Supplier agreement fields: ≥ 90%
- **Coverage**: 80% of in-scope active agreements ingested + extracted
within 60 days.
- **Off-contract spend report**: ≥ 1 quarterly review consumed by
CPO with documented action.
## 5. Timeline
### Days 1–14: Discovery
- W1: kickoff, stakeholder interviews, access requests filed
- W2: corpus reading, working agreement drafted and signed
### Days 15–30: First slice
- W3: MSA ingestion + extraction in staging
- W4: first dashboard live; customer can see output
### Days 31–60: Scale to SLA
- W5–6: onboard remaining document classes
- W7–8: integrate with Snowflake marts and Looker semantic layer
### Days 61–90: Mature
- W9–10: runbooks written and tested with customer's data team
- W11–12: joint on-call; CS picks up relationship
## 6. Owners
| Workstream | Customer owner | Platform owner |
|---------------------------|----------------------|----------------|
| Overall deployment | [VP Procurement] | [FDE-DE name] |
| Data engineering | [Data lead name] | [FDE-DE name] |
| Identity / IT | [IT director] | [FDE-DE name] |
| Business analysts | [Procurement lead] | [FDE-DE name] |
| Account / commercial | [VP Procurement] | [AE name] |
### Escalation routes
- Technical blocker: → Platform Engineering Manager
- Commercial / scope: → AE → VP Sales
- At-risk deployment: → FDE Lead → VP CX
## 7. Kill criteria
We will recommend pausing or reshaping the deployment if:
- 30 days post-discovery, < 70% of in-scope documents can be ingested
due to source-system constraints we cannot work around.
- Extraction quality on any priority class is below SLA after two
full remediation cycles.
- Customer stakeholders cannot align on a single in-scope use case
for > 3 consecutive weeks.
- A regulatory / security requirement surfaces that materially
changes architecture (separate review path).
If any of these triggers, we'll bring options — reshape, defer,
or stop — to a joint review within 1 week.
## 8. Reporting cadence
- **Friday status doc** (every Friday by 12pm customer time)
- What shipped, what's open, what I need from you, what I'm
worried about, next week's plan.
- **Monday sync** (30 min)
- Review status, surface blockers, agree on the week's targets.
- **Monthly leadership review** (45 min)
- Customer sponsor + platform leadership; SLA status, risks,
expansion conversation.
## 9. Sign-off
- Customer sponsor: __________________________ Date: __________
- Platform lead: __________________________ Date: __________
- AE / CS: __________________________ Date: __________Anti-patterns
Vague success criteria
"Improved renewal visibility" is unsignable. "95% of MSAs flagged ≥ 90 days before their earliest notice deadline" is signable. If you can't measure it, the customer will measure it however they feel at month three.
Skipping "out of scope"
The most-skipped section. Without it, scope creep is inevitable. Customers don't think they're being unreasonable when they ask for ERP writeback in week six — they just didn't see it written down as out of scope.
Stretched-too-far timeline
"Hit all classes by week six" sounds aggressive and signals confidence. It also means slipping that milestone in week five is the deployment's first credibility loss. Pad lightly; deliver early instead.
Hand-waved owners
"Both teams will collaborate on integration." Doesn't survive contact with a missed deliverable. Name specific people, including escalation routes. Awkward to write; saves weeks later.
Missing kill criteria
Most documents don't include them because they feel pessimistic. Without them, a deployment that should die slogs on for months. Naming the kill criteria up front is professional, not pessimistic — it gives both sides permission to pause cleanly when the data is clear.
Signing protocol
- Draft from your discovery synthesis (chapter 02).
- Review with the customer's data lead first. They'll spot factual errors and political landmines.
- Iterate. Usually two passes.
- Send to the executive sponsor with a one-paragraph summary email. They will only read the doc if they care; the email is the failsafe.
- Hold a 30-minute sign-off call with the sponsor. Walk through the document. Get verbal commitment on each section.
- Capture sign-off in writing — email confirmation is fine; some customers want DocuSign.
- Distribute to the working team. Pin it in the project channel.
Updating mid-deployment
The working agreement is a living document. It gets updated when:
- Scope changes (new document class added, ERP writeback agreed).
- Success criteria refined (e.g., SLA threshold negotiated up or down based on real data).
- Timeline slips (be honest; don't pretend it didn't).
- An owner changes (new IT director, your team rotates).
Each update bumps the version number; the bottom of the doc has a changelog with one line per version. The customer should always know which version is current. Email when a new version ships.
If the customer learns about a scope change by reading version 1.3 of the doc you didn't tell them about, you've lost trust. Every update has a sentence-long announcement: "scope expanded to include German-language MSAs per request from [name]; SLA at the same threshold."