Hi Shachar,
"Without knowing the details..." You don't need any more details, you hit
the nail on the head. The question is, who would take such a project?
- yba
On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:18:34 +0300
From: Shachar Shemesh <shac...@shemesh.biz>
To: sammy ominsky <s...@avoidant.org>
Cc: ILUG <linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il>
Subject: Re: [YBA] Freescale i.MX27 project
sammy ominsky wrote:
On 13/08/2009, at 09:04, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
The customer is looking for someone who can a commit to doing the board
bring-up process, write the BSP and set up a BusyBox distribution with Qt
libraries within five weeks, with significant penalties for late delivery.
Are there significant bonuses for early delivery?
Without knowing the details, or anything else about the project or the
client, here is what my experience says will happen to anyone brave enough to
submit a quote. This typifies my belief that some clients put up "money
saving" requirements that end up shooting themselves in the foot.
The client is, likely, working under the following constraints:
* They just received the devices from manufacturing, and need to
have the board brought up as soon as possible
* They are living under an external deadline. They cannot extend the
five weeks deadline because it is a deadline to them. This is
either a similar contract with their customer, or an investor who
is impatient to see whether he wants to pull his money, or any
such similar circumstances.
* Engineer looks at the task to be done, says "well, 90% of it is
just duplicating what has already been done for the Freescale
development board, so it shouldn't be a problem".
* Client then says "hey! let's outsource the risk instead of just
the work".
Any reasonable contractor will perform the following calculation:
* There are a huge number of unknowns about this work. You can never
tell how much is "based closely", or what horrendous bugs you will
find in the drivers once you start. I was once involved in a
project (along with TkOS) where the board was "based closely" on
the versatile platform. The project was a 9 months project that
included a lot more than merely bringing up the board, but seven
months into the project "board bringup" tasks were still being
performed.
* As a contractor, if I'm going to accept the client's risks, I need
to be rewarded. In statistical terms, the expected value must be
positive. If the project is at a loss if I am late, it must be
really really profitable if I'm on time, or else there is no point
in taking it up to begin with.
As a result, the quote is typically high. Very high. In addition, the
contractor obviously states that all times are from the point where an order
is issued.
The client is surprised. They usually don't understand that it was their
penalty requirements that drove the price up. After all, this is supposed to
be a simple project, merely performing adaptations to an already brought up
platform, over in five weeks. As a result, it takes a few days, maybe even a
week, to approve the quote (usually demanding that the price become lower).
As far as the contractor is concerned, this week is not counted toward the
delivery date, but since the client is constrained by external deadlines, as
far as they are concerned, it does. The result is that the project is late,
the client AND the contractor start disgruntled at the other side's
"unreasonable behavior", and all sides lose.
Here is what could have been done to make things better. The client issues a
request for a project at cost+, asking for a discount on the hourly rate in
exchange for a significant bonus in case the project is delivered on time.
Mathematically speaking, this offer is identical to the above offer, but as
it is phrased in positive rather than negative terms, it is much easier to
approve. This, of course, means that it can start much earlier, and have a
better chance of succeeding.
Shachar
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