We're talking about a potential budget disaster thatiscalled "Rusher's Gap." Here's how it works. Let's say you'rebuilding a swimming pool. It's easier to talk about a swimming pool, but thishappens for every IT project. You say, I'm going to build a pool. You callsomeone out, he gives you an estimate, very detailed, comes in, $65,000 and yousay to yourself, "You know what? It never comes in on budget." I'mgoing to in my head in finance and go to the bank, I'm going to make sure thatI have enough money for $90,000 because I'm going build it a $25,000 extracushion because I know it's going to cost more than this. Rusher's Gap is thedifference between what you budgeted, this extra overflow, what the contactorsays and what the actual cost of the project is, which might come in at a $110,000.And the point that Bill Rusher was trying to get across was not only are thingsmore expensive than your contractor tells you they are, they are more expensivethan you could even possibly imagine when you sit there at the beginning of thebudget.
The point is when you have a large IT project, you're goingto have an estimate from the contractor, you're going to come in behind thatestimate, you're going to try to tear it apart. You're going to look and seewhere could it go north of that? What are the problems that you could run into,and you're going to build in this fudge factor. But if you don't do a good jobhere and you end up in this area, all you can do is start throwing featuresover the side or pushing out the implementation so it takes longer so that youcan get more money in an extra budget period.
So the lesson is, when you're building this taking an extrastep because otherwise you're going to end up in Rusher's Gap and you're goingto end up with a project that's not giving you all that you want when you needit.
