I have been contracting for 4 years and currently in a right pickle regarding the April changes as I am still waiting for current client to announce their intentions, but given it's a large defence company I suspect it will be a blanket inside IR35. I digress, but the real reason I am posting is that if you think about IR35 from an IT perspective it just does not work. Take for example an existing project that has budget for new user functionality. The project is agile, uses Jira and has fortnightly sprint. The SCRUM master (hate that term) is a permie who with the contractors discusses what's on the sprint board.
Each contractor is assigned a number of Jira tasks, but then within the bounds of the existing code base is a given a free reign to implement and test the changes and where appropriate refactor.
Of course each contractor is to a certain extent managed, otherwise how else do you run an agile project with Jira if you don't tell people what they are working on for the sprint. We all know it's not practical to just have a free for all and let contractors just pick and choose what they want to do, so I struggle to understand how HMRC envisage companies engage with IT contractors post April 2020 for such projects?
Unless firms are going to tender out work with very detailed requirements (yeah right) then how can they utilise IT contractors going forward. In 20 years of IT I have only once had a BA who would create detailed use cases. In all other scenarios I have had to liaise directly with end users to obtain said requirement.
Seems to me it's a terribly thought out mess and the simple approach would have been one based on tenure with a no return period of say 6 months. Eg, you fall inside if you remain contracting at the same place for 12 or 24 months.
Each contractor is assigned a number of Jira tasks, but then within the bounds of the existing code base is a given a free reign to implement and test the changes and where appropriate refactor.
Of course each contractor is to a certain extent managed, otherwise how else do you run an agile project with Jira if you don't tell people what they are working on for the sprint. We all know it's not practical to just have a free for all and let contractors just pick and choose what they want to do, so I struggle to understand how HMRC envisage companies engage with IT contractors post April 2020 for such projects?
Unless firms are going to tender out work with very detailed requirements (yeah right) then how can they utilise IT contractors going forward. In 20 years of IT I have only once had a BA who would create detailed use cases. In all other scenarios I have had to liaise directly with end users to obtain said requirement.
Seems to me it's a terribly thought out mess and the simple approach would have been one based on tenure with a no return period of say 6 months. Eg, you fall inside if you remain contracting at the same place for 12 or 24 months.
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