[LRUG] Contact Work and setting limits

[Rob Lacey]

Wow, I didn't expect that much response and for some very helpful 
comments. Unfortunately the whole project was a fixed price because it 
was for an educational institution with very strict budgets which went 
through an agency, another company who has a relationship with the 
institution. I hold my hands up totally and say I was too confident on 
my estimate, and almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I 
should have doubled the estimate for sure, 2.5 times would have me paid up.

I also didn't keep track of the little changes here and there, I guess 
it feels a but petty to single out the small changes, tweaks and 
ammendments but those small changes that *must* be complete to deem the 
project complete add up and become a whole new section of work in itself 
that I didn't quote for. I find it difficult to say no when of course I 
share a common the goal with the client, I want them to be happy and I 
want the project to be a success. So I should be stricter.

I needed a clear backlog, broken down into parts as small a parts as we 
needed to define the scope of it. I have taken the Certified ScrumMaster 
course and also have worked in a team using Scrum for over a year, but 
when it came to a small project with seemingly small scope I 
underestimated the need for it and it would have been a great help and 
it would have been useful to have a clearly defined set of requirements 
myself and the client could wrangle over.

Next project I'll be stricter, for sure.

Cheers

RobL

Eleanor McHugh wrote:
> On 29 Oct 2009, at 15:04, Rob Lacey wrote:
>> Hey guys,
>>
>> I wanted to ask for a bit of advice about contract work as I know 
>> many of you are contractors or have contracted. I am wrapping up a 
>> project with a client which has been troublesome to say the least. I 
>> initially quoted 13 days to make ammendments to their existing Rails 
>> application, and through the process this has stretched to about 32 
>> days work. So I badly misjudged the length of the project, primarily 
>> because I hadn't realised how broken their app was and how crazy some 
>> of the code was (to me at least), along with requirements creeping in 
>> that I should maybe have said no to, and problems post re-launch 
>> which may have been there all along but have reared their ugly head 
>> only now.
>>
>> The problem being that the client wants a working site, some of the 
>> requirements fell outside of the original spec, and delivering a far 
>> from finished article at the end of the quoted time was not really an 
>> option. I can see from their point of view I quoted a time and price, 
>> and delivered the project be it over a longer period of time so they 
>> got what they wanted. But from my point of view the work I'm 19 days 
>> down which is far from ideal.
>>
>> How does anyone deal with the issue of estimation going horribly 
>> wrong? And how would you broach this with the client, obviously they 
>> thought it would take only the quoted amount that time, so its a 
>> tricky one. Is it fair to approach them and come to some compromise 
>> over the cost of the project or do you just pick yourself up, forget 
>> it and be more mean (and realistic) with your estimates next time.
>
> Based on my own nightmare experiences:
>
> 1. never estimate the cost of development until you've done a full 
> code audit - and if the codebase is large enough that that takes more 
> than two days, charge for;
>
> 2. never quote fixed price/time-scale on short projects: if you have 
> six months of work on your plate there's a chance of staying within 
> that timeframe, on a two-week project you're guaranteed to overrun;
>
> 3. fixed price means fixed spec, so make sure that every change 
> request is documented and costed;
>
> 4. keep a backlog and review it regularly;
>
> 5. assume that things will go wrong at every stage;
>
> 6. the cardinal rule of software estimation: ALWAYS DOUBLE YOUR 
> INITIAL ESTIMATE!!!!
>
>
> Ellie
>
> Eleanor McHugh
> Games With Brains
> http://slides.games-with-brains.net
> ----
> raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason
>
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