[LRUG] Contact Work and setting limits

[Rob Lacey]

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.

RobL