RE: RE: Professional Services

At 09:37 AM 9/01/2004, 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.

While this can work, I would be very hesitant to specify
a fixed-price contract up-front for a CMS project.

Fixed-price requires a detailed (and complete) knowledge of
the project, CMS and site before the contract is signed. If this
information is not available, then what ends up happening is that
features and activities keep being trimmed to fit with fixed-price
contract.

I've personally seen this happen in projects, and it can lead
to fairly immediate project failure, as the CMS (and site) launches without
sufficient quality and depth to be used.

If you are looking to do a fixed-price quote, make sure that
you have done the full design process for the new site (usability
& information architecture) before going out to tender.

At the end of the day, it's all about managing risk and uncertainty.
For those areas that are certain, make them fixed-price. For the
uncertain aspects, manage these more flexibly. (Watch this space for
an article on this topic in the next few days.)

Regards,
James

-------------------------
James Robertson
Step Two Designs Pty Ltd

Knowledge Management / Content Management / Intranets

http://www.steptwo.com.au/
[email protected]

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