Negotiating Out-of-Scope Changes

If you do everything you can during the planning phase to manage the project team's expectations, document the project requirements, develop an appropriate budget, and allocate sufficient resources, the project should come in on time and on budget.

However, despite your best efforts, some aspects of the project can be interpreted differently by the client and consultant.

A Wretched Experience

We were building a custom web application that imported data on a nightly basis from the client's data management system, which we'll call WRETCHED. During the requirements gathering phase, we were told by the IT manager for WRETCHED that we would receive data in any format we specified. We priced the data import aspect of the project accordingly. However, during implementation of the project, the client's IT manager had moved on, and the new IT manager was only willing to export the data in the default system format. This change meant that instead of simply reading in the data file, we had to perform extensive preprocessing and data cleansing during the automated data import process. This effectively doubled the budget for this aspect of ....