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[Contractualize On] Advice for my first consulting gig
kedinik
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I was recently hired to develop customized software for a client; I'll be working with one other developer over the course of about one month.
The client has approved the project and we have agreed to a set of terms, but what clauses should I include in the contract to protect myself from any unfavorable situations that might arise?
For instance, what if the client starts pressuring me to add extra features to the software after the contract has been signed?
For that case, I'm including a clause about the hourly rate to be charged for the inclusion of any additional features beyond what is explicitly laid out in the contract, but I am concerned that there may be situations that I will not be able to predict.
If you have experience as a project manager, consultant, etc, and you can think of commonly occurring conflicts that I should address in the contract, please let me know!
The client has approved the project and we have agreed to a set of terms, but what clauses should I include in the contract to protect myself from any unfavorable situations that might arise?
For instance, what if the client starts pressuring me to add extra features to the software after the contract has been signed?
For that case, I'm including a clause about the hourly rate to be charged for the inclusion of any additional features beyond what is explicitly laid out in the contract, but I am concerned that there may be situations that I will not be able to predict.
If you have experience as a project manager, consultant, etc, and you can think of commonly occurring conflicts that I should address in the contract, please let me know!
kedinik on
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You can see the difference in that the first is vague to the point of uselessness because they may think Amazon.com and you think simple shopping cart -> checkout basic plan. Without a detailed plan not only of what the result should be, but also how it should be verified as 'accepted', you leave yourself open to danger. You cannot say "that wasn't in the plan so you have to pay me more money" nor can you say "I did exactly what I was told to do and you agreed to it beforehand; if you didn't want it, you could have changed the description".
Murphy's Paradox: The more you plan, the more that can go wrong. The less you plan, the less likely your plan will succeed.
I drew up a detailed features list and they are currently reviewing it; pending the approval of the board, the executive director will be ready to sign a contract.
I'm making it very clear in the contract that we are only bound to include the features as defined on the features list, and that we are under no obligation to include any additional features or modifications. They are trying to sneak in extra features now that a price as been settled on, but I'm holding my ground.
The contract will separate payments out into milestones, where whenever a cluster of related features becomes functional as per the contract definition we will bill them for a corresponding fraction of the total fee.
If they cancel the contract while we're midway to a milestone they will be billed a fraction of that milestone's contract value based on the cancellation fee assigned to each individual, component feature that we finished prior to the cancellation.
Does that look like a good approach? From your advice, it sounds like I should focus on defining a "completed feature" so that it will be indisputably clear when payment is due.