Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation

Back when I was managing projects in the traditional way, it wasn’t unusual to spend six weeks in negotiations with a vendor to do something as simple as build a website. While I still experience this, it is usually in conjunction with evaluating the vendor’s product, something that has only become possible because of the how software has matured in the last decade. Today instead of negotiating a contract, we might spend several weeks or even months taking a vendor’s software for a test drive before ever signing a contract.

And by working directly with the customer during the evaluation, minor course corrections can be made based on continuous feedback. The result is that many contracts are never signed. The combination of agile and improved off-the-shelf software has resulted in fewer episodes of buyer regret.