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Selling Tickets instead of Time

2024-07-01 ― corporate

What happened in IT services in the 1980s-1990s?

Companies used to sell lines of code

Any industry needs to sell something in a way of its choosing, and for a while people tried to sell lines of code as their currency in exchange for money, following the idea that it’s what they were producing anyway, so why not put a price on them and sell them directly?

The flaw of this plan appeared gradually, as more and more companies were less and less focused on what was actually delivered, so long as it was delivered and making lots of money. So developers started to generate more and more lines of bloated code for less and less value created for the company, meaning that features would convert with time into more and more lines of code, hence pushing the prices up and the service quality of this industry down.

So what was the answer of the IT services industry?

What happened in IT services in the 2000s-2010s?

Companies used to sell hours of work

This issue of the previous decades was fixed by the introduction in the early 2000s of agility, counting time and calculating efficiency in order to prevent developers from overselling bloated source code. This solution kind of worked, for a while anyway, and IT services companies were efficient again.

Then of course developers found another trick in this new situation in order to continue to oversell:

when lines of code were sold, they were out of reach from the client and in the hands of the contractor, hence bloating the lines of code generated
when time of work was sold, time was out of reach from the client and in the hands of the contractor, hence bloating the time spent on every ticket

So we were back to square one: the IT service quality went down again. So what answer for the 2020s-2030s?

What solution for the future?

Companies can sell tickets, or features, or points of difficulty

Changing the contracts from selling hours into selling tickets or features or points of difficulty is a minuscule change, and yet it achieves everything:

because tickets are in the hands of the client, they’re not in the hands of the contractors, so now it’s impossible for them to bloat anything
now a client can compare the efficiency of different companies, and challenge them
now a client can price his project with great confidence, and move the burden of bug fixes onto the contractor, so out of his way