[YBA] Freescale i.MX27 project

[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

Hi Shachar,
"Without knowing the details..." You don't need any more details, you hit 
the nail on the head. The question is, who would take such a project?

  - yba


On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

> Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:18:34 +0300
> From: Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz>
> To: sammy ominsky <s at avoidant.org>
> Cc: ILUG <linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il>
> Subject: Re: [YBA] Freescale i.MX27 project
> 
> sammy ominsky wrote:
>> On 13/08/2009, at 09:04, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
>> 
>>> The customer is looking for someone who can a commit to doing the board 
>>> bring-up process, write the BSP and set up a BusyBox distribution with Qt 
>>> libraries within five weeks, with significant penalties for late delivery.
>> 
>> Are there significant bonuses for early delivery?
> Without knowing the details, or anything else about the project or the 
> client, here is what my experience says will happen to anyone brave enough to 
> submit a quote. This typifies my belief that some clients put up "money 
> saving" requirements that end up shooting themselves in the foot.
>
> The client is, likely, working under the following constraints:
>
>   * They just received the devices from manufacturing, and need to
>     have the board brought up as soon as possible
>   * They are living under an external deadline. They cannot extend the
>     five weeks deadline because it is a deadline to them. This is
>     either a similar contract with their customer, or an investor who
>     is impatient to see whether he wants to pull his money, or any
>     such similar circumstances.
>   * Engineer looks at the task to be done, says "well, 90% of it is
>     just duplicating what has already been done for the Freescale
>     development board, so it shouldn't be a problem".
>   * Client then says "hey! let's outsource the risk instead of just
>     the work".
>
> Any reasonable contractor will perform the following calculation:
>
>   * There are a huge number of unknowns about this work. You can never
>     tell how much is "based closely", or what horrendous bugs you will
>     find in the drivers once you start. I was once involved in a
>     project (along with TkOS) where the board was "based closely" on
>     the versatile platform. The project was a 9 months project that
>     included a lot more than merely bringing up the board, but seven
>     months into the project "board bringup" tasks were still being
>     performed.
>   * As a contractor, if I'm going to accept the client's risks, I need
>     to be rewarded. In statistical terms, the expected value must be
>     positive. If the project is at a loss if I am late, it must be
>     really really profitable if I'm on time, or else there is no point
>     in taking it up to begin with.
>
> As a result, the quote is typically high. Very high. In addition, the 
> contractor obviously states that all times are from the point where an order 
> is issued.
>
> The client is surprised. They usually don't understand that it was their 
> penalty requirements that drove the price up. After all, this is supposed to 
> be a simple project, merely performing adaptations to an already brought up 
> platform, over in five weeks. As a result, it takes a few days, maybe even a 
> week, to approve the quote (usually demanding that the price become lower). 
> As far as the contractor is concerned, this week is not counted toward the 
> delivery date, but since the client is constrained by external deadlines, as 
> far as they are concerned, it does. The result is that the project is late, 
> the client AND the contractor start disgruntled at the other side's 
> "unreasonable behavior", and all sides lose.
>
> Here is what could have been done to make things better. The client issues a 
> request for a project at cost+, asking for a discount on the hourly rate in 
> exchange for a significant bonus in case the project is delivered on time. 
> Mathematically speaking, this offer is identical to the above offer, but as 
> it is phrased in positive rather than negative terms, it is much easier to 
> approve. This, of course, means that it can start much earlier, and have a 
> better chance of succeeding.
>
> Shachar
>
>

-- 
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      - yba at tkos.co.il - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -
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