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

[David Hazel]

 bet there are enough of these "tales of woe" to publish a nice short story
compilation.

You know, something to read the kids at night when they say they want to
grow up to be like daddy and mommy.

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Jeff Greenberg <jeff at ayendesigns.com>wrote:

> 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."
>
>
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