Inflexible contracts and wobbly cafe tables

Earlier this week I watched a show called the New Inventors. Each week three crackpots (and I mean that in the nicest way) come on the show to demonstrate their inventions. Given the program is shown on the Australian public broadcasting network, it is not surprising that inventions with an agricultural or environmental application usually get up. But not this week.

This week the winning invention was a cafe table levelling mechanism that makes it so your cafe table always has four legs on the ground. The system works by connecting hydraulically each of the leg supports so that when one leg is raised by an uneven paving tile the other legs are automatically pushed down.

This is an ideal metaphor for flexible vendor management. When circumstances change throughout the life of a contract placing pressure on certain deliverables, the contract price or the other deliverables must be adjusted to account for the change. I'm reminded of Implementation tip #3 in an article by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe from Nayima on techniques for fixed-pricing agile software development projects. Pascal recommends only accepting change requests where another feature requiring equal or greater effort is removed from the requirements.

The table metaphor has also got me thinking about ways to capture hydraulic-like vendor management flexibility in a contractual situation. If it gels, I'll write more on that later.

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