Live and Learn? Need advice...

[JRepici]

Hi all,

I have a dilemma...

Can anyone help me figure out how to avoid the following?

Polly (name changed to protect the innocent) calls me up and asks me to do some development work for her. It involves RSS and other forms of syndication, which she knows little about (other than all her content clients are clamoring for it).

We begin working together and she tells me she has cancelled her other prospects for the job, including her job request at elance because she has decided to go with me. She says she is looking for a working relationship with someone who will not only build the application for her, but also teach her what she needs to know about RSS and other relevant technologies.

We begin working together in earnest and I spend a great deal of time with her, setting up example applications on my site and explaining what she needs to know to help me nail down her requirements.

She calls me on Saturday (twice) and again on Sunday. During that weekend we work together on requirements acquisition for a number of hours. This work is to give her an understanding of the issues, and to turn that understanding into a real application brief and estimate. All the while, she repeatedly makes a point of telling me how glad she is that she has decided to go with me for the development and that she has made her choice. She shows me the text of an old elance RFP which was meandering at best.

Then, Sunday afternoon she emails to ask if I think my estimate will come in under elance estimates. Along with the email is an attachment of a new, concise, well-written and cogent outline of the project, which she was able to write as a result of our "relationship", and which she will be posting on elance after all.

Now, reading elance comments about her I see that all the kids there like to say how she comes prepared with concise specifications describing exactly what she wants. Not too hard for them to charge $25/hour to code the project when all they're doing is following someone else's requirements and spec work...

Ok, so I probably made a mistake here...

My problem is I'm having trouble coming up with rules-of-thumb and other "lessons" from this that will help me avoid it in the future. The 7.5 hours of time spent on this requirements and spec work would be easier to eat if I could come away with some extra understanding of how to prevent giving away such services going forward. So:

Question: How do I avoid doing this in the future without turning away possible new prospects?

John Repici

[Wassercrats]

she repeatedly makes a point of telling me how glad she is that she has decided to go with me for the development and that she has made her choice.

My first thought is SUE THE B..... I stopped thinking after that.

In the future, get stuff in writing after a certain amount of consultation. If someone promises something, they should be willing to put it in writing. Maybe try to speed up the "requirements acquisition" process.

[Rich]

Question: How do I avoid doing this in the future without turning away possible new prospects?

Well, the short answer is you can't. What you should have done is charged her for your time to help develop the requirements document. Some people (and she sounds like one of them) will not give you the job to just define requirements, so this is why my answer says you will turn away some new prospects. However, if you continue to do "free work" you will continue to fall into this trap.

[JRepici]

Thanks for your replies guys.

Wassercrats,

The first thing I did was go back and look at her emails. It seemed clear she had planned to do this because the only time she ever made a commitment was on the phone. She may have made one in IM's but I don't save those so couldn't go back and look (that is one change I have made in response to this).

This was a long requirements phase mainly because she was so clueless about the subject matter her clients were clamoring for. I tend to be what the M3 crowd (XPers) refer to as a Big Design Up Front developer.

Rich,

That is the conclusion I'm coming around to. I have set up my charges based on coding time, with the actual design work usually a (free) loss leader. This works fine for local clients I can drive to, but the phone clients that come in over the internet will need a more realistic approach to cost issues.

Is it better to send a few good prospects away than to do free work for a few bad prospects? That is the crux. Like you I lean to the former because the other way would really just be making good prospects pay for bad prospects...

That's a very distasteful notion.


John Repici

[Andilinks]

We begin working together in earnest and I spend a great deal of time with her, setting up example applications on my site...

You might say or imply that you are incorporating "proprietary elements" into the work.

There probably aren't too many people as devious as Polly, so telling a fib like this to test a prospect's sincerity may be too much under most circumstances.

But maybe after being burned once you need some device to reinstill your faith in prospects.

Or better yet, develop some genuine proprietary elements.

Andi

[Chipmunk]

John, sorry to hear about your experience!

Have you made any attempt to get paid for your time? If I understand the situation, you did provide some sort of "deliverable", which you solely own. It doesn't hurt to ask, and you could (very) gently mention reputation (you indicated elance has a ranking mechanism). Even if you can negotiate a partial payment, that's better than nothing.

Is it better to send a few good prospects away than to do free work for a few bad prospects? That is the crux.

Personally, I find coding fun (yeah I'm an XPer), and mind-reading/extraction-of-specs very not fun, so I always charge full rate for everything. I can see doing initial negotiations (less than an hour total) "off" the clock, but I can not see any legitimate reason why a "good" prospect would not be willing to pay for development of specs. If they want "free" work up front, then I do not consider them a good prospect. Others probably have different opinions and experiences.

After a project is done and paid for, I often do some free phone support, mostly because the time overhead for billing isn't worth the hassle, plus they've earned some goodwill.

Good luck!

[JRepici]

Andi,

I was a bit angry about it at first, but even as I was looking through the emails I realized there was nothing to be done to go backward and change what happened (not without throwing good time after bad to paraphrase).

It really very quickly became about debriefing. That is, determining how to best adjust practices so that it would minimize time lost on this going forward. I usually include my own library grade functions and other elements, which I license on a per application basis, but always as a deliverable within the formal contract.

What I find very interesting about yours and Chip's suggestion is to do something up-front, early on in the relationship that insures I get paid for the design work. What might work here is some short, easy-to-follow contract (perhaps a page or two and combined with a mutual NDA) that could be faxed and signed quickly.

Not the entire specification agreement but just something that states there is value associated with the consulting work that must be paid if the resulting development contract is not awarded to me. This would have to be a very discreetly written agreement. Don't know if I've got that in me.

Chip,

At the risk of appearing to practice one-upmanship (the purest form of American culture don't you think?) I have to say I love all aspects of programming. Each facet of the practice has its own rewards and challenges, and its own unique form of flow. Variety is the spice of life!

I'll agree with XPers that coding has the most intense form of flow. Probably because it requires so much time to get into and is the most mentally consuming. Coding was the first time I ever experience flow (as I'm sure is true for most programmers) and its the closest thing to an Out Of Body (OOB) experience you can get. It is such an altered and incredible state, that if I didn't already have a religion, I'd probably end up joining with you in the XP "movement". ( cheap shot I know)

Requirements acquisition is different than coding. It is a shallower form of flow but makes up for it by being the only form you can experience interactively with other humans. It is probably what people once really meant by brainstorming, but the term brainstorming has been utterly diluted by corporate boardroom lackeys. M3 tries to make up for this by insisting on pair programming, but this is the worst of both worlds IMO. It's like mashed potatoes without the bones; never allowing the complete depth that comes from lone coding, while insisting on maintaining the same bland working consistency all ... day ... long ...

Design work on the other hand can be just as intense as coding and can also be nearly an OOB. It is different than the flow you enter when coding though. It is more forgiving, allowing you to disperse your thoughts more at the expense of some detailed grasp of individual items, while letting you mentally travel back and forth between high and low levels of abstraction. Hacking, is an integral part of design work, but like the worksheets on your tax forms, the stuff you deliver should never include hacked code (IMO, I know you disagree).


User and Developer Doc was the last and most difficult aspect of programming for me to develop a taste for. I've always known it was an essential part of programming but did it grudgingly. I now find the joy in it. In many ways, if programming is a symphony then Docs are still the dissonance, but a symphony isn't a symphony without dissonance.

Got off on a tangent there. My apologies to the topic police




All,

I'm starting to formulate some good rules and suggestions. Thank you for your help.

1. Basic, non-threatening, low-intensity-commitment, starter-contract for quick fax when a phoned-in relationship shows signs of jelling (Wass..., Andi and Chip).

2. Prospects who reject any responsibility for the cost of design are NOT good prospects (from Rich and an XPer!).

3. Save IM's as well as emails and hard-copy correspondence (me).

4. The crux: Trust must be earned. Once some mutual actions have ensued the formalisms can be relaxed, but if you don't know someone... Well, you just don't know them (Andi, and all).

5. One attribute noticed in hindsight about Polly: She always wrote to ask me to get on the phone. Some are just more comfortable speaking voice (I imagine there are differences between genders here). Should I get red flags when someone is constantly asking to "talk"?


Have I missed any actionable items?

John Repici

he-HE said . . . "actionable"
(there's a term Dogbert would be proud of).

[hobbes]

Coming late to this, but in general if what the client is looking for is at all complex or ill-defined and will require more than 1-2 hours of time invested to just develop a proposal, then work out with them that you will charge X/hour. It's not as if they'll end up empty-handed for the $ as they'll have a concise requirements and possibly design document. Up to you whether to waive the fee if the client accepts the proposal.

In this particular case, you may want to consider just invoicing her for your time and see what she does...

Obviously if you're dealing with a very large client and/or responding to a formal RFP, you may have to consider up front costs a loss leader.

[Wassercrats]

If that woman was willing to make a decision based on a per-hour quote, why did you need to get into the requirements aquisition stage before there's a contract? Let her give her bad description of what she wants and if seems like you could handle it, give her your hourly fee, then let her sign, then you could work out the details for no charge, knowing you'll be paid for the programming.

It's more complicated if she also wanted an estimate of how long it will take, but I would just give her the best estimate I could based on what she could tell me. If she ends up wanting something different than what she described, that's her problem.

She says she is looking for a working relationship with someone who will not only build the application for her, but also teach her what she needs to know about RSS and other relevant technologies. I spend a great deal of time with her...explaining what she needs to know...

I think some of that explaining should have been post-contract. I don't think she expected to be taught much before she hired you, but you were obviously willing.

[Chipmunk]

First the business stuff (then some friendly XP stuff):

Excellent postmortem! In cases like this where someone clearly was malicious, the healthiest things are to write off the lost time, and analyze what you can do to prevent a repeat occurrence.

I've been lucky in that most of my solo and group freelance stuff has been thru referrals, so it's been easy to be direct about what things cost, and not do any upfront part "off" the clock. I have had bad luck in some larger projects, but had always taken sane legal precautions, so was able to recover most, though once it took a collection agency (was about 14k$ so was worthwhile).

Perhaps I'm unclear on things, but it does sound like you provided some form of "deliverable", and that it is your expectation that she will be putting that (probably modified) on elance for the purposes of hiring someone cheaper to do the rest of the work. If that is so, then you have a lever (copyright infringement) to negotiate some sort of payment. If she uses something you created without paying, then she is stealing. You may not feel comfortable with that, but I know that the "7.5" billable hours you mentioned probably cost you a lot more total time, and certainly grief. If she refuses to pay for your time, which she initiated, can you put in a warning to others thru elance? I understand if you want to wash your hands of it - that probably is the most time efficient thing to do.

On the phone point, I suspect that was an intentional con on her part. One tip I was given by an oldster many years ago, is to follow up every phonecall with an email summarizing the call. If you're feeling particularly paranoid, blind-cc it to a third party email account, such as Yahoo. Once trust has been built (on payment history, etc), you can relax your style.