A New Pricing Structure For IT Projects

By now, we’ve all heard the old saw:

“Faster, Cheaper, Better — Pick Two”

For IT projects, I like to rephrase it as

“Faster, Cheaper, Better, Secure — Pick One”


Speed adds risk to any IT project. How many times have you been asked to do a “cheap and simple” project by the end of the week, only to discover that the urgency stopped anyone thinking about whether it really was cheap OR simple.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why don’t we allow the invisible hand of the market to help the customer decide if it really is urgent?

My tongue-in-cheek suggestion for today:


The Urgency Factor

Give the customer a normal price for doing it next month, but

  • If they want it next week, the Urgency Factor is 10 times the normal price.
  • If they want it tomorrow, the Urgency Factor is 100 times the normal price.
  • If they want it today, the Urgency Factor is 1000 times the normal price.

If, somehow, we could get away with this, we’d spend a lot less time creating messes that we have to clean up.

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