sammy ominsky wrote:
On 13/08/2009, at 09:04, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
The customer is looking for someone who can a commit to doing the
board bring-up process, write the BSP and set up a BusyBox
distribution with Qt libraries within five weeks, with significant
penalties for late delivery.
Are there significant bonuses for early delivery?
Without knowing the details, or anything else about the project or the
client, here is what my experience says will happen to anyone brave
enough to submit a quote. This typifies my belief that some clients put
up "money saving" requirements that end up shooting themselves in the foot.
The client is, likely, working under the following constraints:
* They just received the devices from manufacturing, and need to
have the board brought up as soon as possible
* They are living under an external deadline. They cannot extend the
five weeks deadline because it is a deadline to them. This is
either a similar contract with their customer, or an investor who
is impatient to see whether he wants to pull his money, or any
such similar circumstances.
* Engineer looks at the task to be done, says "well, 90% of it is
just duplicating what has already been done for the Freescale
development board, so it shouldn't be a problem".
* Client then says "hey! let's outsource the risk instead of just
the work".
Any reasonable contractor will perform the following calculation:
* There are a huge number of unknowns about this work. You can never
tell how much is "based closely", or what horrendous bugs you will
find in the drivers once you start. I was once involved in a
project (along with TkOS) where the board was "based closely" on
the versatile platform. The project was a 9 months project that
included a lot more than merely bringing up the board, but seven
months into the project "board bringup" tasks were still being
performed.
* As a contractor, if I'm going to accept the client's risks, I need
to be rewarded. In statistical terms, the expected value must be
positive. If the project is at a loss if I am late, it must be
really really profitable if I'm on time, or else there is no point
in taking it up to begin with.
As a result, the quote is typically high. Very high. In addition, the
contractor obviously states that all times are from the point where an
order is issued.
The client is surprised. They usually don't understand that it was their
penalty requirements that drove the price up. After all, this is
supposed to be a simple project, merely performing adaptations to an
already brought up platform, over in five weeks. As a result, it takes a
few days, maybe even a week, to approve the quote (usually demanding
that the price become lower). As far as the contractor is concerned,
this week is not counted toward the delivery date, but since the client
is constrained by external deadlines, as far as they are concerned, it
does. The result is that the project is late, the client AND the
contractor start disgruntled at the other side's "unreasonable
behavior", and all sides lose.
Here is what could have been done to make things better. The client
issues a request for a project at cost+, asking for a discount on the
hourly rate in exchange for a significant bonus in case the project is
delivered on time. Mathematically speaking, this offer is identical to
the above offer, but as it is phrased in positive rather than negative
terms, it is much easier to approve. This, of course, means that it can
start much earlier, and have a better chance of succeeding.
Shachar
--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com
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