Re: Pricing the Design Process

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
------------
IA Summit 2007:  Enriching IA
Rich Information, Rich Interaction, Rich Relationships
March 22-26, 2007, Las Vegas, NV
www.iasummit.org
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Re: Pricing the Design Process

Thread: Re: Pricing the Design Process