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Acceptance Criteria Definition – A Project Before the Project

March 15, 2007 |

When you provide professional services you usually have two contracting options: either you deliver services by the hour (or day) in a “time and materials” kind of contract, or you offer a “fixed cost” for fixed deliverables contract. The former gives flexibility to the client to cut losses soon if you do not work hard enough (or convince your client you are doing so): you could be fired with little notice. It also reduces the liability of the consultant: if the client wants to make you loose time, pursue side projects, or do anything beyond the scope of the project you can be fine with it: it is their dime.Fixed cost contracts need fixed deliverables. And I do not mean a paragraph of what is included and another one of what is not included. I mean an Acceptance Criteria Checklist or Acceptance Criteria Test Plan. Something that has little square boxes where you put a check mark and once all of them are filled you invoice. It has to be done before you enter into the consulting project. Before people sign on the dotted line and before you agree to start working.

From Experience:
Recently I took on a consulting project in a hurry where creating the Acceptance Test Plan was one of the many deliverables in the statement of work contract. As you may imagine, the client uses the old trick of delaying the sign-off on the Acceptance Test Plan until one extra item is added, and then again until another small extra item is added, and so on. Every day that goes on you increase your stakes (all of the days that you have given already), and the client improves their position (they have received services for which they still don’t have to pay – and if you walk out, they don’t have to pay anything).

Potential Solution / Lesson Learned
The way of avoiding this is to create the Acceptance Criteria before a Statement of Work contract is signed. That in itself may become a small project of its own, which may required paid services from the consultant: don’t be afraid to offer consulting time to create the Acceptance Criteria – the customer will either accept and pay for those services, or will draft the criteria by themselves and send it to you for inclusion on the Statement of Work for the big project.

Whatever you do, do not make the creation of an Acceptance Criteria document one of multiple deliverables in your project – you would be exposing yourself too much.


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