“Please proceed with change request 47, as quoted.”
The email is polite, short, and four months late. Change request 47 was quoted in the middle of development. Two weeks of work, a clear price, signed off by the project manager and sent to the client for a decision. The client said they would think about it.
They thought about it until acceptance testing.
The project is still running. The project manager is still there, the status meeting is still on Tuesday, and from the client’s side nothing much seems to have changed. Inside the team, a lot has. Development is finished, so the development team has gone from eight people to three, and those three are busy fixing the defects the client’s testers keep finding. The developer who built that interface has moved to another project. The architect who reviewed the design is booked elsewhere until next quarter.
But the client has a quote, the quote has a price, and as far as the client is concerned, the price still stands.
It was quoted, after all.
The Extra Outlet
Picture a house being built. The walls are up but still open, and the electrician is pulling cables through the frame. Walking around the site, you decide you would like one more power outlet in the kitchen.
You ask the builder. He checks with the electrician and quotes on the spot. Half an hour of work and a small bill. The cable is right there.
You say you will think about it.
Four months later, the house is nearly done. You do the final walk-through with the builder, punch list in hand. A door that sticks, a scratch on a tile, a missing light switch cover. And that extra outlet, please. Half an hour and a small bill, as quoted.
The builder is still on site, and so is his finishing crew. The electrician is not. He finished his part three months ago and is wiring a house across town. The walls have been closed, plastered, and painted, and the kitchen has been tiled. Now somebody has to get the electrician back, open the wall, run the cable, and plaster, paint, and tile it again.
Two days, and five times the price.
“But you quoted half an hour.”
He did. With the walls open.
A Quote is Not a Voucher
A change request quote is a snapshot. It is priced on the conditions of that moment: the people in the team, the knowledge in their heads, and the work that is still open and easy to change. Take those away, and the quote is worth about as much as the outlet price after the plasterer has been.
What makes this mistake so common is that the project is still running. The builder is still on site, so the client assumes the capacity is still there. Nobody sees that the one trade the change depends on has already left.
The client is not being unreasonable either. Nobody told them the quote had a shelf life. Nothing on the paper said so. It said two weeks and a price, and that reads like a voucher that can be handed in whenever it suits.
In projects with an Agile component, the same thing happens through the backlog. The change gets estimated during development and sits there, sprint after sprint, while the team that estimated it gets smaller. When the product owner finally pulls it in, the number on the story was produced by people who are no longer in the room.
Then the arguments start. The client points at the quote. The supplier points at the team list. Both are right, and the project manager is left explaining why two weeks has turned into six, in the middle of a test phase that has no slack for any of it.
Two Dates on Every Quote
The fix costs one sentence per quote. Every change request quote should carry two dates, not one.
The first is the Decision Date. Approve by this date, or the quote lapses. Some quotes already have a validity period somewhere in the small print. Move it out of the small print.
The second is the Delivery Period: the start and end dates between which the change can be built at the quoted time and cost. Not before, and not after.
Not before, because the change often touches something that is still being built. Doing it too early means doing it twice.
Not after, because the developers and specialists who would build it will roll off the project once development is finished. Name that moment explicitly, for example, the last development sprint, or the code freeze before acceptance testing starts.
Then state the assumption the price is based on, in plain words: ”This quote assumes the current development team, including the integration specialist, is still on the project.” A client who reads that sentence understands the deal. A client who never sees it cannot be blamed for treating the quote as a voucher.
Once the delivery period has passed, the request does not die. It becomes a new request, quoted again by whoever is on the team at that point, at whatever it costs at that point. That is not a penalty. It is the honest price.
The Steering Committee has a role here too. A change request that sits undecided for months is not neutral. Every week of delay brings the end of development closer, and somebody at that table should be asking why it is still undecided.
The builder learned his lesson. His quotes now come with one extra line at the bottom.
Valid until the walls are closed.
The plasterer starts on Monday.