The Innocent Statement

Can someone tell me the link between this entry and the film Lightning Jack?

Yesterday at Netring we had an experience. To be honest we have lots of experiences here, and when I get the time you will probably be able to share in them somewhat, if you wish.

Today we received a specification from an associate company. We have worked with them in the past, and look forward to working with them more in the future. In the spec that they sent us, they wanted us to provide an ASP.NET backend to a website that they were developing. They would do the design work, and provide us with XHTML templates for us to build into the ASP.NET backend.

It all sounded great, and it looked like a nice project to work on.

The spec they had written up was well written, covering everything we needed to know. There weren't many questions we had to ask and this made a quote easy to give.

It wasn't a simple project, a good three weeks work. Two weeks for the initial build, and one week for testing, big fixes and quality assurance. The also required as close to valid XHTML as possible. This is a bit of an unknown factor; even though we always aim to achieve 100% Valid XHTML, getting it in ASP.NET isn't always easy, and could have potentially placed a lot of extra time onto the development.

Anyway, we gave them a quotation that we felt was fair based on how long we thought it would take us to do the work. We made sure to give ourselves enough time for the small unexpected things (like having a web control that wont produce valid XHTML), and enough time to give it some testing to assure good quality. The only way they would get a better quote was to go with someone that was either (a), not going to give them a quality job, or (b), desperate for the work.

Unfortunately, the quote we gave was too much for the budget that our associates had set aside. You see, unknown to us, but our friends had already set aside a financial plan with their client, and set aside a chosen amount of funds for the work they were offering to us. But they had not set aside an adequate amount. Without accurate knowledge of what would be included in our part of the bargain, they forgot to quote for the unexpected, and for quality testing.

We tried to work something out; we even dropped our quotation a bit. Saying that we would benefit as a company for the extra work put into producing valid XHTML we dropped charges for that. But it was still too much for our associates, and they were restricted by the budget they set for themselves.

I think that both sides were disappointed to be missing out of the opportunity to work together. They have said that next time they will include us in the pricing arrangements earlier. Hopefully that way we/they won't forget to quote for the unexpected.