[Sigia-l] Pricing the Design Process

[jamie foggon]

jamie foggon:

If you can convince clients to pay you per hour, that's zero risk
isn't it?

Ziya:

No, it isn't. Certainly not for the client or the project.

By-the-hour has a lot of shortcomings, a very short sampling of which would
include:

+   It gives every incentive to the biller to pad his time and maximize his
revenue at the expense of the client.


I was talking purely from the vendors perspective. Of course there is
risk for the client - which is what I meant with my reference to
getting clients to understand what agile development really means -
and accepting the risk of scope on the promise of higher quality.

You can still give a best guess estimate for the project as a whole,
which for example, might be based on 4 iterations of 4 resources for 4
weeks. The reason you need trust on the part of the client is because
you don't commit to x hundred features based on a vastly detailed
proposal. Agile accepts that projects usually need to adapt as they
progress, rather than predict exactly what the end result will be.

I probably wasn't clear enough about what I mean't by hourly billing.
With agile time-boxing it's not totally open ended - there would
usually be an overall budget. And of course if the vendor does not
deliver an acceptable product at the end of x iterations then the
client will either demand a change in billing approach or a change in
vendor :-)

Ziya:
+   It focuses the mind of the biller on deliverables, instead of optimal
solutions or alternatives.
+   It practically eliminates any latitude for risks, mistakes, experiments
and learning...

With agile it's the opposite. It's very light on deliverables, the
focus switching to building a usable product at the end of each
iteration. It's very user-centred in its approach as you can build
user testing cycles into each iteration to feed into requirements for
the next.

Probably a subject for a separate thread (if there hasn't already been
one) is how the design process fits into the agile methodology - which
has some big challenges. I'd be interested to hear other people's
experiences with this.


-- 
Jamie Foggon