My customer’s engineering doesn’t care about my budget. According to the contract, all of my non-recurring costs are included until the requirements freeze milestone of the project. Probably because of this, my customer doesn’t care about dates either. Our final requirement freeze milestone was moved (by the customer) five times – from January 2010 to December 2011. The only thing my customer is asking for is to assure the quality of the product.

My customer’s management cares about my budget. They want an agreed end date for my services because every prolongation costs a lot of money. Starting this week I have to report my earned value. As requested, I did a burn up chart for 2012 based on the agile methodology (story points).

So even if my project is planned in days and measured in $$, I want to measure the value of my project based on the product, especially on product quality. In points. Agreed with the team, to be agreed with the management. Uff.

We never have time to do things right, but we always have time to do things twice.

In 2012 I do not care about my milestones and I also do not care about my budget. No, I am not kidding. There are two ways to spend too much of both: doing things wrong and doing wrong things. I will take care about quality. That’s all. In other words: It is better to have a happy customer than an earned value above 1.

May the force be with me.