Gates Foundation suing Saama Technologies on claims of fraud and more
geekwire.com
geekwire.com
When these types of projects fail, it's usually because management is having problems juggling resources, and under-bid on the project. Or they're selling junior devs as senior devs.
From my view:
- Be expert in the domain of the code you're delivering. Both project leadership and at least a portion of the devs. In one project I observed, the contractor was a professor, took a large contract, and hired 6 grad students to fulfill it. None of them had professional experience, let alone domain experience. Disaster ensued.
- Don't let commercial concerns get in the way of project success. If you've underbid and the company can survive the loss, take it on the chin and learn from the mistake. If you can't survive the loss, sit down with the customer and say, "We underbid and we can't survive the loss." Show them where you are and give them a chance to increase the budget. If they don't, fall back on your contract terms and terminate the project. You have contract terms that allow you to terminate without cause, right? Choosing to reduce the team, bring in lower cost devs, or deliver unfinished or untested code simply makes a bad situation worse. Don't do it.
This is also why it is so insanely hard to find contract for a company: clients are not fools. Not most of them, at least.
Caveat: companies also know that and learned very well to pretend to be individual developers since recently.
In essence, my experience leads me to conclusion that custom software development is evil and should not exist. There is no space for it to be win-win.
When you say "There is no good reason to hire a contractor", I'd disagree. There are a few excellent business reasons to do so. The first is you simply don't have that expertise in-house. The second is you have the expertise, but your resources are on other priorities.
Hiring an outside firm can be a quick way to gain an asset with the custom features not available on the market with off the shelf software. Many companies do this custom contracting, and they do it successfully. My own experience is with a company that has done it successfully. Your own experience would appear to be with a firm that has been unsuccessful. There are so many factors that go into the success of a project, and your firm may not be organized in a way to allow you to be successful. There's nothing inherent to contracting itself that leads to failure.
Firm that has been unsuccessful - problem is, most of these firms were and are quite successful. Their clients aren't.
PS: maybe i am just too burnt out and trying to prove myself that leaving custom development is a good idea.
> For example, according to CW1, a Big Data/Analytics Lead, a certain segment of the Saama’s sales force involved in setting up the scope and pricing of projects routinely fails to involve the company’s delivery teams to determine whether what had been represented to customers can actually be delivered. CW1 describes these individuals as high-level employees who are “running the show.” 26.
> CW1 further explained that these sales employees commit Saama to projects without knowing whether they are feasible and that, as a result, “a lot of bizarre situations” emerge, including “bad deliverables.”
Please insert "which" in the title after the comma; otherwise it makes little sense.
There are still results on Google, but they either 404 or just have the Gates Foundation part removed!
they were almost a year behind a schedule. that is not the case of "stopped your progress", they had no progress to be stopped