You Can't Estimate Chaos — But You Can Contract Around It
· 13 min read
Six weeks into a fixed-price project, the burn rate is already outrunning delivered value. The estimate was reasonable, the requirements were signed off, and the team started well. Then reality intervened: a "minor clarification" from the customer turned out to touch three modules instead of one. A dependency that looked like a two-day integration took two weeks because the third-party API didn't behave anything like its documentation. A supposedly settled requirement reopened after a missing stakeholder saw the first demo. None of these events, on its own, looks like a crisis. Together, they produce the change request nobody wanted and the budget increase nobody planned for.