>>We have a slightly different approach. For customized software (so if there is any code that is done specifically for the client) they have to continue with the "Maintenance Contract". As long as they pay the yearly fee, we provide the service they need, and we ensure that employees are trained
>
>Here's an interesting point: how many times do you train the workers? (I hate the politically rectified "employee" - are they there just to suffer the employment or to get some work done?)

That is exactly the reason why we are trying to educate the client that it costs money to keep the knowledge up to date. For customized software, when we charge the maintenance contract per year, when there is a support situation and I send someone who is new in this particular project, we spend extra energy and time to train him at that moment for the task at hand. Either we send someone together with that new person who has some experience in that project to work him in, or we have made some SOP's, or we sit together and go through the work that needs to be done. All extra time and effort which we do not charge, because that all is part of that coverage which the client pays for.
Some client have the feeling if they pay X amount per year and we have a total of Y amount of hours work done, then the hourly earnings of our company would equal X/Y. But that is not true, in reality it just turns out to be a realistic amount.

>In today's rat-race workplace, many clients tend to run a high turnover workforce. Whatever you taught them pretty much evaporates in a couple of years, which is my estimate for the time when 50% of the workers there have been replaced. The newbies have never seen your app, and whatever you did to accommodate their needs may now be worthless, as the people who asked for certain features are now gone, and the newbies don't even know how to use them.

That is not so much the case in the Caribbean, it's more slow paced here.

>In the early nineties I had a case where in the morning I installed a feature they were screaming for, and got a first support call just as I arrived back at the office. Why? Second shift didn't have a clue about it.

What happened to me not long time ago, the client asked us about a checkbox that "suddenly" appeared on their data entry form, which they are using on a daily basis. Turns out the button was there already for 10 years, but they have never noticed it. Until someone clicked on it, and they thought we just added that checkbox recently.


>Now if people who work in the same office, just at different times of day (and they did reshuffle a lot and switched shifts frequently and they all knew each other) didn't even tell the other shift about a new feature in software they use all day, imagine how much information gets passed from those who are leaving (voluntarily or not, gruntled or dis-) to those who come to replace them.
>
>I even had some customers where I knew more of their history than their current staff did.