Fixed-Fee Portal Engagement and the Late CIO Scope Demand

Do not accept or refuse in the room. Acknowledge the business need, then state that you cannot confirm commercial impact without an impact assessment and that you will bring one back within three business days. This is not evasion; it prevents an undocumented verbal commitment from becoming a de facto contract change.

Actions:

• Re-read the SOW and proposal assumptions; confirm in writing that EDI 856 and multi-currency are not in scope and were not priced.
• Have the delivery lead and architect size the work bottom-up; validate the 240-hour figure against the actual integration and FX requirements rather than reusing the earlier rough estimate.
• Log the request in the decision log and RAID log the same day, with the CIO named as requester and the date.
• Brief your engagement partner and the account executive before the next client contact so the relationship owner and delivery lead are not contradicting each other.
• Ask the CIO to submit the request through the change-control form, and confirm that no EDI or multi-currency build work starts until it is signed.

At the steering committee, separate facts from interpretation: what the SOW covers, what has been accepted, current burn versus completion, and the quantified impact of the two items. Avoid framing it as the client's fault; frame it as protecting the go-live date and the quality of the four committed deliverables. Reference-account pressure is a commercial consideration for your firm, not a reason to absorb unpriced work silently.

Present four options with explicit margin and risk consequences.

1. Absorb at no cost. Rejects on economics: 240 unpriced hours against a 58% burn at 43% completion already threatens the fee. It also sets a precedent for the remaining eight weeks and trains the client that late requests are free.
2. Full change order. Price the 240 hours and the 3-week extension, with a revised milestone and invoice schedule. Cleanest commercially, but risks the relationship and the reference.
3. Scope trade. Keep the fee and date by removing or deferring something of comparable value, for example the reporting pack to phase 2 or reducing cutover support from four weeks to two. This preserves the relationship while protecting margin.
4. Phased addition. Deliver EDI 856 before go-live only if the carrier mandates it; defer multi-currency to a post-go-live phase at a pre-agreed rate. This reduces the delay to roughly one week and caps exposure.

Recommend option 4 combined with option 3, with a not-to-exceed cap and a written assumption list. Rationale: it addresses the CIO's stated business driver, keeps the reference intact, and converts an open-ended demand into a bounded, priced commitment. Before proposing it, reforecast estimate-at-completion honestly; the 58% versus 43% gap suggests either an estimating error or unrecovered effort, and the partner needs that number to decide whether any absorption is even affordable. Whatever is chosen, the decision and its rationale belong in writing, signed by someone with budget authority.

• Revised SOW or signed change order naming scope, fee, dates, and assumptions. This is the only artifact that changes the contractual baseline.
• Impact assessment with hours by role, elapsed delay, and effect on each of the four deliverables. It converts a verbal demand into a decision the CIO can own.
• Decision log entry recording the request, the options presented, the chosen option, the decision-maker, and the date. It is the defense if memories diverge at invoice time.
• Re-baselined plan and milestone schedule, including the new configuration and UAT windows. A fee change without a date change usually just moves the overrun later.
• Updated RAID log, adding the sponsor turnover as a realized risk and the new CIO's expectations as an assumption to validate.
• Steering committee minutes issued within 48 hours, with an explicit "decisions required" section.
• Invoice and cash plan aligned to acceptance, not elapsed time, given that only invoice 1 has been paid.
• Internal escalation note to the engagement partner and finance, covering margin exposure and the reference-account consideration.

Stakeholder steps: map the new CIO's influencers, including the CFO who controls the budget and the operations lead who owns the carriers. Meet the CFO separately to explain the cost of the two additions in business terms, and confirm who besides the CIO can approve a change. Do not let the account executive negotiate scope informally; agree one channel for all change requests and restate it in the next steering pack.