[LRUG] Contact Work and setting limits

[Simon Sebright]

Hi Rob,

I second the idea of the backlog.  Make a clear itemised list of what you 
are going to do, and most important, put it in priority order, agreed with 
the client.  Ideally group them into deliverable chunks which make sense 
together.

As soon as a new requirement comes up, the transparency is there, it has to 
go into the backlog and it has to be given a priority ranking in there.

It's in the nature of software development to discover the unexpected - one 
would hope that a company which has a software asset understands this.  Most 
individuals are probably going to understand when the car mechanic rings up 
and says, "We quoted you for new brake pads, but you need disks all round". 
They might be unhappy about paying, but will probably go with it.  We need 
to make sure that it's the same for us.

Simon

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Rob Lacey" <contact at robl.me>
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 4:04 PM
To: "London Ruby Users Group" <chat at lists.lrug.org>
Subject: [LRUG] Contact Work and setting limits

> 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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