Spent the weekend (really the last two weeks) preparing to engage some
business partners on a project whose plan got somewhat sideways.
much longer to elicit because the business vision was not complete, nor
were all that participated invested in a vision. There has been a lot of drama around this project, because business execs
felt deceived. While the project team felt like it had been
extraordinarily transparent. Then someone said it. Business reality implied a fixed bid process. While
IT was working on a time and materials project. It explains why business gets angry and hostile when we shed scope to meet
a date. Their reality is fixed bid. Internal IT rarely does fixed bid estimates. There is no motivation. No
profit. We only ever bill what we spend. But what if we did? What would
we do with the profit? Reality?
Anonymous
August 31, 2010 at 4:15 pmHi Richard,
Fixed Bid works fine if the requirements are well understood and static. This is never the case, in my experience. Put something in front of a sponsor and they’ll say “that’s exactly what I asked for; here’s what I now know I want.” In the old days with a construction company, we used to low-ball the contract and more than make up for it in the Change Orders.