[LRUG] Contact Work and setting limits

[Red Davis]

I'd say charge per day/hour.

Also when giving an estimation on how long something will take, I multiply
however long I think it will take by 2.5.

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Rob Lacey <contact at robl.me> 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.
>
> RobL
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>
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