Bring Back Time/Materials Billing

by Simon Aloyts
August 22, 2012

Why do I agree to billing hourly? I don’t just agree, I insist upon it. I love the edge and energy it gives me when I see a meter running. And I infect the team with it. The knowledge that every meeting I arrange with my developers dings me for time spent multiplied by people spending it prevents a whole slew of nonsense from being meeting fodder. How many meetings would you NOT attend if the organizer paid the attendees hourly? Lawyers figured this out from the beginning. Call yours and ask a question and you’ll get a bill for 6 minutes (their favorite interval of 1/10th of an hour). This is why I try to have all discussions of TV and weather over with before getting legal on the phone. By contrast, how many meetings full of people (but devoid of agenda) have you walked out of wondering where 3 hours had just gone? I call such time-wasters “Agenda Amputees.” Time and materials billing has other advantages. Every change you want is made without a fight. How many projects have you worked on when every single thing creates a blood bath with new estimates and new signatures and on and on? This is incredibly counterproductive, slows the project and strains relationships. The Waterfall methodology for software projects has been widely debunked long ago. I am convinced that the prior dotcom crash was responsible in a very large degree for the end of the era of what I call “Document Masturbation” – creating reams of pointless requirements and use cases that no one ever reads. How much better would it have been to, in the same time frame, get 3 or 4 working prototypes? And if you couldn’t do that because you can’t put your thoughts into a small uploadable package for intelligent developers, that should be a fiery red flag that you have no idea what the hades you’re doing and probably shouldn’t be wasting good people’s money in the first place. Waterfall has roots in civil engineering and construction. And probably legal – who else gets paid for forests worth of documents that pretend to protect the customer? Why the system made the jump to programming I have no idea. Why is natural gas priced as a substitute for oil? Anyway, change is certain. “We won’t be making changes” is a complete and utter fairy tale. In my years, this has NEVER, not once proven true. (If you disagree then I regret that your world needs an upgrade to a modern operating system.) Why fight over certainty? It’s much easier to just budget for it. 

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