RE: RE: Professional Services

On Thu, 2004-01-08 at 17:37, Drew Volpe wrote:
> One suggestion I have is to negotiate a fixed price contract up
> front.  CMS projects can quickly get expensive as there's a
> million different directions in which they can be taken.  It's
> very easy for a consultant to keep adding small, incremental 
> features which can quickly double or triple the project's cost.
> 

Wow, on this end we generally see the opposite - clients 
adding small, incremental features, but not wanting to 
pay for them.  And then wondering why things get behind schedule, 
and why they keep being told 'no' all the time.

Fixed price is going to likely burn both sides, because 
human nature is generally to want to make changes during 
development.  I'm talking about clients.  If devs 
do extra work outside the scope without being asked to, 
tough nuts on them - they shouldn't bill for that.  But 
if a fixed price is put together, generally the client 
will be told 'no' a whole lot from a 'good' dev team, 
or will be told 'yes' from a bad team who will get 
WAY behind schedule, skimping on the rest of the project 
which was agreed to beforehand.

What needs to happen in most projects is a time 
and material approach with *regular* communication 
(like, every couple days at least).  That way there
are no surprises budget-wise when changes come up.
"Yes we can do that, and it'll be an extra 26 hours 
and push things back 1 week.  Do we go ahead?"



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Michael Kimsal                               734-480-9961
http://www.tapinternet.com - PHP training and development
http://www.logicreate.com - LogiCreate development system
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please trim your posts.