Yes!! All good points Micheal!! On 2023-03-16 12:22, Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss wrote: > Those sorts of things you typically would want to do as some sort of > Statement of Work (SOW) you build based on some consulting or at least > a good grilling session to pick out what they have, what they want, > and determine how long you'd need to do it, complete with > contingencies. You could do it as a fixed-price and scope, but those > never work out well for you mostly, as you'll get caught up in > customer BS in just getting straight answers out of most. If you have > a nice, clearly defined template of what the customer needs to > provide, including a full list of up-front needs as deliverables, but > for either you need to be sure you can get in and out as quickly as > you say you can, or both sides will end up losing in the deal. > > Even if inside your head you just expect them to give you information > or *just* create some accounts, you never know what sort of politics > and drama you might encounter to delay things. Go work for a 50+ year > old company and see how long anything can possibly take, possibly > weeks/months. > > Best thing you can do is make a timeline as a literal project. I use > MS Project to do so (one of the two M$ apps I love, aside from Visio), > breaking out each and every action, request, receipt of request > fulfillment, deployments, validations, dependencies, the whole works, > including both reasonable timelines for completion. This then > provides you a visible project timeline in the form of a Gantt chart > even, but you can start with a baseline to then go and provide a list > of every request up front to a customer, and let them determine how > long they can fulfill each, then you can adjust your SOW, project, and > timeline (and project costs) accordingly. ProjectLibre is OSS and > also works as well, plus various online project saas' now, all come > with some learning curve, but one more folks in the industry should > know. > > If the customer then delays you and thus the project unexpectedly > outside your projected and documented timeline, your Statement of Work > of course will (ahem, should) define and necessitate use of Change > Orders they are responsible for in terms of overage costs and know > that up front as projections were made on their direct input. If you > did a fixed-bid project, you are thus screwed and eat their delay for > whatever reasons. > > Case in point, my last customer we had a project on the table to move > various management services to Okta SSO for same reasons, but the IAM > team was a mess that ran it with people coming and quitting as quick, > and was in works for 7 months before I finally ran away from the mess, > leaving it for their team and some other poor bastard to get around to > implementing my documented requests eventually. At least it was all > billable hours as staff aug more than pure consulting, so as they sat > on their thumbs, I just went and did other work. It was the same > there for a major network tool they purchased I worked on trying to > get ServiceNow integration and Okta between teams. A week long > project could easily become a 6mo to year long thing in some messes of > organizations when consulting... > > -mb > > On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 10:43 AM Snyder, Alexander J via > PLUG-discuss wrote: > >> To all those who have done contracted technology consulting ... what >> do you charge? >> >> I've been doing work on the side for a local HVAC company, largely >> technology administration stuff ... simple stuff ... setup website >> hosting, DNS, setup laptops when they need ... nothing terribly hard >> or time consuming. >> >> Recently I've grown frustrated with all the manual steps involved >> with setting up a new user account ... Google/M365/LastPass/Adobe >> ... so I decided to dig in for a bit and enable domain federation >> (SAML/SSO) on them. >> >> To my utter delight, it worked and was fast easier to set up than I >> initially thought. >> >> Now, when i create a new account in Google, an account will be >> automatically provisioned in both LastPass and M365, hooray! In >> going to queen on the same for Adobe DC later today. >> >> My question is ... what do I charge for this? What's reasonable? I'm >> already fairly technically inclined, so it wasn't that difficult for >> me to read the instructions and follow along ... but there was a >> fair bit of PowerShell scripting required on the M365 part, as that >> work could only be done with PowerShell using the AzureAD & MSOnline >> modules. >> >> I appreciate your input, as this level of work for a customer is a >> first for me. >> >> Thanks, >> Alexander >> >> Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S22+ >> --------------------------------------------------- >> PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org >> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss