Oh, the Horror of Just One More Delay

Mary is a public relations manager for a nonprofit agency. She is charged with redesigning the organization's web site and integrating it with a new financial system the organization is implementing. Although Mary does not have any experience with web site development, she is a regular user of e-mail and sometimes reads popular news web sites and makes online purchases. Mary writes down all the things she wants the new web site to do and then asks her friends for recommendations for consultants and firms. Over the next several months, she gets ten different proposals, from 2 pages to more than 50 pages, ranging from a few hundred dollars to over $30,000. With such a wide range of proposals, Mary takes nearly a month to select the two firms....