Successful software contracts

Contracting of software development projects and maintenance continues to be a difficult task for many organizations. They struggle to determine which questions they need to ask in the ´Request for Proposal (RFP)´ and contracting phases. These organizations wish to find the questions that would enable them to compare the bidding suppliers in an objective, yet meaningful way and they wish to select the right supplier based on this comparison. In practice, the industry sees many RFPs that seem to achieve this goal at first glance, but which offer a comparison that is not objective and meaningful at all. As a consequence, in many cases the wrong supplier is selected, which can (and often does) result in a failing project. Repeatedly, suppliers argue with client organizations about the objectivity of the tender and the reasons for missed offers and sometimes they even start legal action.

The urgency to improve the management of contracts and the execution of software projects again became evident in the conclusions of the Dutch Parliamentary Investigation ICT (the Elias committee): the Dutch government has insufficient control over the majority of their own IT projects. Many projects fail, while keeping a ‘green light dashboard status’ until the end, even when the project gets cancelled.

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