IT contracting
Agile and DevOps agreements, cloud rollouts, SLAs and liability.
An agile contract does not mean the scope is undefined. It means the scope is defined by the way of working and the decision mechanism rather than by a feature list — and that the mechanism can later be shown to an auditor.
In practice the hardest part is reconciling two things that speak different languages inside an organisation: a team working in iterations, and an internal procedure that demands accountability to the comma.
A common argument
„Agile and fixed price are mutually exclusive.”
How it actually is
They exclude each other only when the fixed price covers an undefined scope. A fixed budget, a fixed cadence and a variable scope with a priority order all work together — you just have to decide which of the three the contract lets move.
Questions I hear most often
- ? How do we write acceptance when we work in two-week iterations?
- ? Who is liable for an outage in the cloud provider’s environment?
- ? What does a sensible SLA look like for a service that updates itself?
- ? What happens to maintenance when the vendor’s team turns over?
Materials in this area
See allModel clauses: contracting with an AI vendor
Clauses on training data, rights to output, mid-term model changes and liability for hallucinations — annotated with what is actually negotiable.
An agile contract that survives an audit
Scope described by the way of working rather than a feature list — and how to square that with accountability and the person who audits it later.