Work Agreements

Work Agreements

Mark: works for WorkerFlows, focus on long-term engagement with non-profits

Different kinds of work agreements:

The contracts used by WorkerFlows:

• Discovery phase work agreement - concrete # of hours
  • Counter to traditional RFP process, which doesn’t work
  • It’s like an awesome first date, and ensures that there are well thought-out estimates of the time needed for each part
  • Sit down for 1 face-to-face meeting
  • Go through discovery aspect, figure out the story of what’s happening/what needs to happen
  • Go through tools that could work
  • Follow-up meeting to make sure they got everything right
  • Deliverable is a document
    • can differ depending on audience: if WF is doing the project, can be straight-forward; if the report is going to funders, will make it pretty
    • after the document is done, the contract is done
• Development work agreement - if possible, like to have a contract for each phase of the development process
• Maintenance agreement
  • pick a certain number of hours a month that WF will be on retainer
  • client pays for all hours, even if WF doesn’t use it - the extra hours are used to make sure there’s someone trained on the project

What WorkerFlows finds works well:

• phased approach
  • How are phases determined?
    • Often separate by feature sets
    • But WF also does an MVP of multiple feature set, if that makes sense
• Contracts done in plain language (~ a paragraph)
• variable scope with budget cap OR fixed scope billed hourly

Other peoples’ experience:

• Thiago
  • is dealing with a client that loves to have ideas in midstream
  • don’t have a formal (or good) way to handle this
• Rachel
  • lots of fiscal upheaval
  • is trying to keep everything they build open
  • have subcontractors too
  • in conclusion, lots of contracts!
• Josh
  • Also does the discover part, and has never had any clients go to someone else.
  • Will give time estimate and budget cap.
  • Sometimes eats the extra cost.
  • Uses a detailed statement of work, but does sometime get clients who realize half-way through that they’re getting something different than what they thought
• Andrea
  • Works for DesignAction
  • also have a long discover process - get to know the organization and its goals
  • contract has details about the design process, the development process, and a retainer
  • clients have the ability to decide whether they want to use extra hours in retainer or go into the next month
  • make it VERY clear that success is a collaborative effort
  • have all discussions in Basecamp so
• Rebecca
  • was tasked with project managing a project with:
    • 12 years of resentment between the partners
    • deliverables declared without input from one of the partners
    • massive miscommunication

Healthy practices

• Make everything explicit
• Rachel did an RFP where she kept in the clients’ responsibilities - that felt very healthy and upfront
• Tools to show the tradeoffs of priorities
• If the client wants something you don’t think is a good idea, give clients all the information (including your opinion) but trust clients to make their own decision
  • • they know their own interests best
• Create a collaborative environment!
  • this is a partnership, not a traditional business engagement (i.e. extract all profit)
  • That’s why honesty is so important.
  • Also making sure there’s no “I told you so.”
• Building in a buffer on every feature set
• Upwell has a list of reasons for choosing projects/dev shops.
  • Points of unity help inform how to phrase contracts

Unhealthy practices:

• Eating hours
  • Mark: put the pro bono hours in the invoice
    • but makes it clear to clients that the hours are really at the discretion of the individual developer
  • Josh: eats the hours if he mis-estimates the amount of time
  • You can’t claim your hours as donations - the IRS does not consider human labor as donate-able
  • Rachel wants to know when you work extra hours, because she can often pay more
  • on the other hand, small gifts do a lot for the relationship
• Stakeholders who have put a random line in the sand
  • it's hard to navigate the emotional issues when individuals in the project are very invested in particular features
  • sometimes it's important to just let that person have their thing
• Gatekeepers afraid of their bosses
• Requirements made in a vacuum
  • RFPs are horrible
  • But they’re also a way of opening up a conversation
  • So maybe what we should be looking out for is the Very Specific RFP
• Boilerplate work-for-hire agreements