Fixed Price Projects

Custom software development enables organizations to provide their end-users with a software that completely matches their needs. However, developing custom software is not trivial and a series of challenges may quickly arise.

There may be technical challenges first. If the tools and technologies used in the implementation of the project are not correctly mastered by the project team, it may induce additional risks of not delivering the required applications on time and on budget.

Then there may also be integration challenges. Somehow, the newly implemented systems may have to communicate with other applications in order to execute existing logic or exchange data. Integration must be seen at two different levels: functional and technical integration.

The project management aspects are not to be neglected either. Organizing a project for custom software development brings collaborative challenges such as making people work together efficiently during the different phases of the software development project.

Finally, adequacy of the delivered applications to the expressed initial business requirements is a crucial aspect when evaluating the success of a project. First the requirements may not have been accurately expressed or understood, then these requirements may have evolved over time with the project unable to cope with requirement changes, finally acceptance testing after the delivery is a crucial step that is often under-evaluated resulting in poor software quality delivered and frustrated end-users.

At the end of the day, the questions that all ICT managers have to ask are: "is this custom software development project really the core business of my department ?"

As part of our Professional Services, PearlChain.net can outsource the development of custom software for our customers. PearlChain.net, after a pre-study of the project, will engage itself on a fixed budget and planning for the delivery of the custom software. For each fixed price project we can customize our standard methodology based on iterative methodologies (Unified Process), agile development (scrum, agile) and extreme programming (continuous development, test-driven programming,…). Of course, the customization is based on the customer and project objectives.

PearlChain.net defines a standard governance for a fixed price project. We also define with the customer the most appropriate governance (coordination, steering,…) that allow regular reporting and efficient decision-making processes in order to maximize the chances of success of the project. 

PearlChain.net can leverage the knowledge of its consultants in order to make sure that the appropriate skills will be working on the project at the appropriate time. This will maximize the resources allocation and budget management of the project.

Our internal competence centers are finally also a critical source of information for the project. Our internal collaborative methods make sure that a problem in a project can be solved not only by consultants working on the project but by the whole PearlChain.net organization.