Have you ever had a Project or 'Potential' Project appear in your Inbox for review and after reading it your initial thoughts are "I Don't want to touch this project even with a 10ft Barge Pole!" ?
I am unfortunatley faced with such a dilema and could really use some advice.
The contract is to support and enhance an existing product (not one of our own) for a fixed price and for a fixed term.
Unfortunatley there is no specification for the enhancements to the product, no SLA for the support/maintenance,infact there are no defined deliverables at all, just statements like "..product to be enhanced to be on a par with 'insert rival product name'". There is however a whopping great sum of money which the business owners cant see past.
The customer is unwilling or unable to define/specify within the contract the enhancements they require and similarily unwilling or unable to define an SLA for the support.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the contract itself offers our company absolutley no protection at all if the work escalates (as I expect they will) beyond all reasonable expectations.
Ideally I am looking for some ideas for a phrase or statement that I can get inserted into the contract which will offer us some protection.
Don't have a phrase you can have inserted, but have a couple thoughts for you.
First ... a contract like that really isn't in your customer's best interest either. They can end up throwing PILES of money into a project that just rambles on and on. For example, I know of a large North American airline who bought a flight planning system years ago for approx $10 million. Last time I heard they were still working on installing/customizing it, and the overall cost was approaching the $50 million mark, and it was only useful for a small % of their flights. I don't know details, but this sounds like a similar type of situation to me.
A Project is defined as something with a defined start and end, with a known/discrete amount of work to be done....something like that anyways.
Why don't you propose a smaller project up front, strictly for the purpose of helping your customer define what it is they want. Your company lead the requirement gathering,and possibly some design work. At the end of the work, you provide the projects deliverables "documentation". Your company gets paid for their services, your customer has a much better idea of what they really want/need, and your company is already in line to do the build.
It's really a win-win situation. Your company is still making money, your company ends up protected as there will be a much better definition of the projects you are undertaking, your customer is protected as they will only pay for agreed-to work, etc.
Then you define the contract to do the build, testing, etc as it should then have a very defined start, finish, scope, etc. You can pitch the benefit here to your customer, that they can then make better informed choices (e.g. perhaps buying a product would be better)
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 98 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea..."
