Project Management

As with any type of debt, technical debt happens when you borrow from the future for today. You select a solution that will be fast and easy to develop — a solution that will get you past your major hurdles. But you know that the solution won’t be as elegant or well-optimized as it could be, and you know that it will make development more complicated later on.

The project manager role has taken on a greater amount of prominence in the past decade. This is true across numerous industries, including the software development industry. Still, there is plenty of confusion about what a project manager does, as well as about what project management is—and isn’t.

On average, three out of ten IT projects fail among companies that aren’t in the top 25% of technology producers (1). Of those projects that succeed, more than half of them eventually cost almost 200% of their original estimates (2). The IT sector is booming and IT projects are plentiful, yet as many as a third of these projects are put to rest before they are ever completed.

You’ve finally settled on the right software developer and it’s time to set up a contract. You don’t want a pricing model that will force you to renegotiate late, so you want to get it right the first time. Let’s break down two popular software project pricing models to help you make an informed decision.