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> A lot of the [...] perverse incentives vanish when you bill days instead of hours. I'm confused how that's supposed to eliminate perverse incentives. Doesn't

• tptacek 4y ago
  If you bill hourly, you have a strong incentive not to invest in process improvements that will cut the number of hours you bill. Most process improvements worth investing in are measured in at least hours. If you bill daily, you have a lot of headroom to make yourself more efficient before you get to a place where efficiency is cutting into your returns. That's the most mechanical way to respond to the question, but I could keep noodling on reasons you'll work more efficiently billing days than hours. (If you can bill weeks, you should bill weeks!)
• makeitdouble 4y ago
  I too see how on paper it doesn't seem to change anything, but I think culturally it's a huge gap. The incentives are not always to bill the most, and you also might have to pitch a time estimate before starting the task. Having a day as the minimum unit removes the need to decide if it's a 2h fix or a 5h fix, an estimate that could take 2h in itself to reach. Then a lot of scrum team will report advancement daily, and it will be way easier to communicate with the client with a billing that fits that cycle (this is also where you probably don't want to report small time sliced increments to the client, if they're already not very happy with your 20 days estimate for changing a page's footer)