Contractual Issues Revisited

Earlier in this chapter, it was stated that toward the end of the Elaboration phase, the overall scope and length of the Construction phase are determined, including the number and length of iterations. This implies that the contractor can set the date of the IOC according to the project's needs. In an outsourcing situation, this is often not the case. A delivery date for the IOC may have been set contractually long before the Construction phase was set to begin. This could mean that you do not have sufficient time for enough iterations to completely deliver all intended functionality in the IOC. Although this is not an ideal situation, it is manageable. You have three alternatives:

• Convince the customer to accept the IOC without all the intended functionality. Renegotiate the priorities of the functionality to be implemented so that the most important functionality gets completed for the IOC. Explain that the remaining functionality can be delivered during the Transition phase releases.

• Convince the customer to push out the date for the IOC to allow enough time for iterations to deliver the needed functionality for the IOC.

• Descope the requirements or defer them to another time.

The point is that some flexibility from the client is required.