Standard PCG contract for fixed price work?

[Wanderer]

Demonstrates risk, and demonstrates an ability to increase your margin by delivering early and/or working more efficiently. What's not to like?

I agree with Peter Loew and bobspud. I always nail down a spec when bidding for a fixed price contract. If there is no spec then they have to pay to have it scoped out. By far the easiest way to do these jobs in on an hour/daily rate though. If you bid on a job without a detailed spec then you end up having heated discussions with the client over what's included and what's not. That's not my style, I like my business to avoid risk where possible and build goodwill by nailing down a detailed spec, delivering what I promise and dealing with scope creep in a professional manner.

If you are talking about risk being likable from the point of view of a potentially IR35 avoiding permie-tractor then you have a point and every little helps but this particular job will be subcontracted out so it's pretty much got an IR35 silver bullet there. I wouldn't go accepting a risk (ie, poorly scoped project) that my business could mitigate against with some good management just to win a bit of IR35 karma...

why aren't you asking this question on the PCG boards?

[Peter Loew]

Whatever you do. You must have a specification to deliver against, otherwise you have no way to prove that you delivered to order and deserve the money.

Offer them 5 days T&M to develop a broad scope and get that agreed and signed off by them. once you have this you can agree a fixed price for the delivery.

Other than that offer T&M.

Agree. Put a few days discovery phase into your project to nail down the spec, then that becomes your acceptance criteria on which you can deliver.

[bobspud]

Whatever you do. You must have a specification to deliver against, otherwise you have no way to prove that you delivered to order and deserve the money.

Offer them 5 days T&M to develop a broad scope and get that agreed and signed off by them. once you have this you can agree a fixed price for the delivery.

Other than that offer T&M.

[malvolio]

Maybe because YS is looking for a broad spectrum of advice?

It may come as a bit of a surprise Mal but not all posters on the Professional boards are clueless.

True. But if they have access to the specific, members-only contract, why not ask the people that actually use them?

That wasn't what I was asking, though; There's no reason at all why you wouldn't ask the question on here, I'm just intrigued why you would ask the same question on the PCG fora.

[cojak]

Demonstrates risk, and demonstrates an ability to increase your margin by delivering early and/or working more efficiently. What's not to like?

I'm assuming you're looking at the direct supply PCG contract rather than trying to bodge the general purpose public one. So just a thought - why aren't you asking this question on the PCG boards?

Maybe because YS is looking for a broad spectrum of advice?

It may come as a bit of a surprise Mal but not all posters on the Professional boards are clueless.

[malvolio]

As some of you might have seen in the other thread, I am struggling to negotiate a good deal with the client.
They still want to give me a fixed-price quota. W/o the scope, which is undefined atm, this is obviously akin to attempts of clarvoyance on my side.
I am thinking of simply giving then an eqivalent of daily rate x n number of days and saying that I can deliver this project, with this budget in this amount of time, again without defining what the project really is.
Any drawbacks to that?

Demonstrates risk, and demonstrates an ability to increase your margin by delivering early and/or working more efficiently. What's not to like?

I'm assuming you're looking at the direct supply PCG contract rather than trying to bodge the general purpose public one. So just a thought - why aren't you asking this question on the PCG boards?

[yasockie]

As some of you might have seen in the other thread, I am struggling to negotiate a good deal with the client.
They still want to give me a fixed-price quota. W/o the scope, which is undefined atm, this is obviously akin to attempts of clarvoyance on my side.
I am thinking of simply giving then an eqivalent of daily rate x n number of days and saying that I can deliver this project, with this budget in this amount of time, again without defining what the project really is.
Any drawbacks to that?

[BlasterBates]

One tip....

Produce an acceptance spec. if you can.

This is a sure fire way to ensure you know when you are finished and it works.

i.e. given data input....Report B will have these values in it and will look like this.

You can basically offer them a fixed price to produce a requirements doc plus acceptance specification.

When you've completed that phase you can quote for the implementation. Anything that changes the acceptance spec. is then clearly an enhancement.

Doing the acceptance spec. will clarify an awful lot. It is a very useful exercise indeed.

Anything done after the acceptance spec. should be negotiated as a maintenance contract. Obviously there may be some glitches that would need to be fixed like a crash but anything else would clearly be an enhancement, i.e. speeding things up.

In fact you may want to clarify things like response times in the requirements spec.

[yasockie]

Currently we're arriving at sth like payment every 14 days, up to 7 days after a delivery of each sprint, I will be charging my rate + rate of my devs + markup for PM etc
I actually know how much they are charging their end client, I wonder what's realistic to charge them, given that I do all the work and they just forward email? I was thinking as high as 85%, is that realistic?

[Taita]

Basically I've been approached by a small consultancy to do some development work for them - this includes me and me hiring some devs and I can then quote for the whole thing.

Even though the work is going to be estimated as a whole, fixed price, because they're small and the requirements may change I still want to charge them for days worked ideally every week, with short payment terms (7 working days I think should do).

For such an arrangement, would a standard PCG contract work?

Count on it. The requirements will change so you need to have an agreed (written) specification before setting the price (for a set number of days in total). Then you can ask the client for stage payments based on number of days work delivered. Be clear on what will give rise to you asking for more money than the 'fixed' price.

No need to be nasty but please beware of only having an 'understanding' with them because they are nice, honest people. All that changes very quickly when their client pressures them for additional work or alterations which they cannot bill as extras and they are starting to lose money on the deal.

[yasockie]

Basically I've been approached by a small consultancy to do some development work for them - this includes me and me hiring some devs and I can then quote for the whole thing.

Even though the work is going to be estimated as a whole, fixed price, because they're small and the requirements may change I still want to charge them for days worked ideally every week, with short payment terms (7 working days I think should do).

For such an arrangement, would a standard PCG contract work?