Comparing what you bought with what you receive at a Revesby premises

Daily work is self-policing to a degree, because people notice when a room is dirty. Periodic work is not, and it is where an annual review finds most of what it finds. Take the periodic list from the scope, put the stated interval next to each item, and ask when it was last performed. Anything that has slipped a cycle or was never scheduled will show up in ten minutes.

Expect a mixed result. Some items will have been done and never recorded, which is a reporting problem. Some will have been quietly dropped because they were difficult to schedule, which is a planning problem. A few will turn out to be unnecessary, and removing them is a legitimate outcome of the review rather than a concession by either party. Recording the outcome against each item takes a few minutes and gives next year a starting point.

Take the area schedule and walk the premises with it, ticking off spaces that still exist and noting those that do not. In most buildings a year produces several changes: a room repurposed, an area vacated, a new space occupied, a store converted to something else. The scope will not have followed any of them unless someone made a point of it. Marking the changes on the schedule as you walk is quicker than writing notes to transcribe later.

While walking, note anything being cleaned that is not in the scope and anything in the scope that is clearly not being cleaned. Both are common and both are worth resolving. Work performed outside the scope indicates goodwill that will disappear when the staff change; work in the scope but not performed indicates a schedule nobody has been able to deliver as written. Both are worth resolving in the same amendment rather than being carried into another year.

The review is only useful if it changes the document. Amend the scope rather than writing a new one, so the history of what was agreed remains visible. Add the areas that appeared, remove those that went, adjust the frequencies the walk showed to be wrong, and reschedule or delete the periodic items that have not been happening. Dating the amendment and keeping the previous version makes the change history straightforward to follow.

Then confirm any price effect in writing before it applies. A review that adjusts the work but leaves the commercial position vague simply produces a different set of assumptions for next year. Where the net effect is a reduction, say so plainly; reviews that only ever move upward stop being held after the second or third one. A review that produces a modest reduction one year and a modest increase the next is a sign it is working.