Proposal a La Scrum

3 points by sambalbadjak 4 years ago | 1 comment

I have a potential client that has a list of features and changes he wants for an existing internal app. He would like me to make a proposal.

However, as: - I haven't seen this internal app - nor have I seen the code - nor do I know if this guy is going to be nit-picky

making a proposal seems futile. A feature can take 4 hours, or 4 days, I don't know.

At my normal job I just work in sprints, which work great as every party involved knows what is expected from each other. So I would like to propose he takes on a couple of sprints from me, and we can discuss together what feature has priority.

Does anyone have experience doing it this way? What would be the best way to approach this?

Thanks

ajmurmann 4 years ago |

I've worked with clients in a similar way, but without the commitment portion of scrum. We'd discuss priority order, scope, estimates and then bill hourly. Worked very well.

IMO fixed price features aren't good for either party. Your customer doesn't/shouldn't want you to cut corners or get sloppy if things are more complex than expected. If the customer doesn't like the incremental work delivered, they should end the engagement. To set expectations better, you should have an initial scoping to understand what they are looking for and ideally give you some time with three codebase to understand what you are getting into