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If you can't be flexible on the delivery date, you have to be flexible in feature scope. That means building a simple verison first that still fulfills the pur
by tcmb 8y ago
If you can't be flexible on the delivery date, you have to be flexible in feature scope.
That means building a simple verison first that still fulfills the purpose while not being perfect or polished. Then iteratively improve it to what you and the customer ideally want.
That way, if the deadline comes before you're done, you at least have a working version that fulfills the basic need and allows the kind of workflow that's necessary, even if it still has some rough edges or even gaps in rarely used areas.
Of course this approach requires you to write your contracts in a way that doesn't tie you down too strictly on how exactly things will be solved.
- zdragnar 8y agoSadly, when it comes to contracts, that gets boiled down in most customers' minds to: "Vendor only commit to delivering buggy and incomplete software". It's a hard sell for most types of projects, even if it's the actual reality of most projects.
- chii 8y agoYou sell a small portion, for the same smaller price tag. Then when the deadline comes, the customer checks to see if you delivered, and decides to continue the contract or find somebody else. So the customer can have assurances that they aint gonna be bogged down with sunk costs. The developer can have more frequent deliveries.