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• Hedging (Score:3, Insightful)

  by dws (341)

  "In 99.9% of the cases" is hedging, and hedging is a good thing. It shows that your customers have learned not to think in absolutes, And it gives you the opportunity to probe (which makes them think further). That's a far better situation then having them say "In 100% of the cases, No!", only to discover later--after you're well into implementation--that there's this messy little "Yes" case 0.1% of the time.
  • Hedge Fun (Score:3, Insightful)

    by petdance (2468) <andy@petdance.com> on 2003.07.29 10:48 (#22512) Homepage Journal

    Yeah, they don't like to think in absolutes, so they hedge, so they need to realize that there's a cost involved.

    "We might maybe potentially possibly add some Foo down the road, some time, in the future, but we're not sure when, if ever."

    "OK, so should we also build into the system the capability of handling Foo? I'll need to revise estimates of the project, but offhand I'd say it'll be at least two more weeks. It'll be harder to maintain, too, but I can't quite put a time on that." (or $x,000 more dollars)

    "Oh, don't do that."

    Any feature costs time/money. Once you point out that they're asking for a room in the house that they'll never use, they usually don't mind dropping the room from the blueprints.

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    xoa

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