Having spent a very long time as a consultant, a thing vendors sometimes do is commit to unrealistic project schedules and then attempt to invoice their way out of the hole they've dug for themselves, and by "sometimes" I mean "every times, every of the times", it is one of the most common ways consulting projects blow up.
When your project blows up, the professional thing to do is to resolve the problem with the client before billing another hour over the SOW. The common, crazy thing to do instead is optimistic invoicing: the client must share our priors, we're all reasonable people, so we'll just implicitly revise the SOW to match our learnings on this project and proceed, prioritizing what we believe would be a successful delivery of the project over everything else. That rarely works.
Serious consultancies routinely eat billable weeks of time in order to meet client success criteria and retain relationships.
I read it as “Statement of Work” which is description of the work to be performed/delivered, although often much more general than a full technical specification, sometimes in a comedically tragic way.
When your project blows up, the professional thing to do is to resolve the problem with the client before billing another hour over the SOW. The common, crazy thing to do instead is optimistic invoicing: the client must share our priors, we're all reasonable people, so we'll just implicitly revise the SOW to match our learnings on this project and proceed, prioritizing what we believe would be a successful delivery of the project over everything else. That rarely works.
Serious consultancies routinely eat billable weeks of time in order to meet client success criteria and retain relationships.