Honest solutions

As a customer you want to ensure yourself of honest advice and a solution that is associated with the issue that you try to tackle. In other words the solution should be a proportional answer to the question that is solved by it. In our daily practice we have seen through the years quite a number of solutions that have cost many times the original issue. For example the automation of incidentally executed tasks, etc. Conclusion: corporate profit and customer benefit do not always go hand in hand. We may pride ourselves on the very long-time relationships with our customers and the secret lies in our commitment to perform our work in the interest of the customer. For us this means that sometimes a customer is better helped by us not doing something, than by us doing something. Unfortunately there are plenty of examples in which this is done differently and sometimes the list of unsuccessful it-projects seems longer than the one with successful projects. Also, often very elaborate solutions are being suggested, where also a simple module would have worked. Elaborate solutions are like chasing the Holy Grail: time consuming! and often, by the time the solution finally is ready, the world again looks completely different. Even worse are those projects during which the changing reality is continuously inserted into the project. It is only logical that such projects shall never be completed! This is why we are very keen on doing projects on a fixed price/fixed time basis. To us it seems only logical that an IT supplier should be able to provide a fair calculation of the scope of the project: after all it is our business. We are surprised that many customers still have to take project risk themselves, because of time/material based agreements. After all, IT is complex and a slight slip of attention often directly results in enormously increased costs! It is very much the question if the costs at that moment still justify the initial business case.