[consulting] Ah, the trials and tribulations of sub-ing - a tale of woe

[Jeff Greenberg]

I've been a development consultant in one flavor or another (freelance, 
humongous computer company, software house, etc.) since punch cards, and 
at one point was managing consultant for an international development 
practice, so I've seen just about everything...enough to where I am an 
independent freelancer now and don't miss the rest :-)


So I have an associate who is a Flash guy, who tosses me online stores 
to do a couple-few times a year. It's normally an informal thing, in 
terms of him telling me what's involved in the way of anything unusual 
with shipping, product options, the other gotchas, and I give him a price.


He comes to me with a site that had an oscommerce store and wants a new 
site. Normal cart, nothing special. Only 18 products. Some templating. I 
had other things on my calendar, and he needed this started right away, 
and said he'd pay double. So I totaled it up, and quote $2500.


Not long after it started, it became obvious that there was going to be 
trouble. His client had another consultant under hire, who had wanted 
the store business, and in addition to being bent out of shape about not 
getting it, managed to get inserted between the owners and my contractor 
as a "PM". Those of you who have been PM's will appreciate 'being one' 
yet not having a specification, not wanting the project to succeed, and 
having nothing be your fault (when I was a PM, the responsibility for 
everything fell on me).


But the real issue was that the store was far from normal. A short list 
of the customizations I had to make to Ubercart include

    -importing a csv file - column format inconsistent - containing 
tracking information for orders, where the order had to have packaging, 
shipment, and status automatically created and updated and an email sent

    -automatically exporting orders as edi

    -writing a script to import the oscommerce data

    -custom admin reports

    -creating an intermediary payment gateway (since Ubercart can't 
handle two being active) to handle a special card

    -modifying the credit system to account for the normal cards needing 
CVV but this other card not only not having CVV but not having an 
expiration date


I looked at all of that (by way of a 'QA' document the 'PM' sent...which 
basically said where is this stuff?) and told him that none of this was 
included in the 'normal store' quote. He said yeah, just do it hourly.


So we get to the end of the project, and (a) I decide not to charge him 
double for the hourly stuff nor my expedited/out-of-hours uplift, most 
of it having been done at night because I was putting in 12-16 hours a 
day, (b) I even gave him a 10% courtesy discount, and the invoice BEYOND 
the original was a bit over $7000.


He called and asked whether there wasn't something we could do about the 
amount. I said, "yes, you can stop giving fixed-price quotes on anything 
without a concrete spec to start with."