Life is a learning experience. If you lived though ti you are better because of it. On 2023-03-16 12:54, Snyder, Alexander J via PLUG-discuss wrote: > The work is done, though -- LOL ... Did I just short myself a few > hundred dollars? > > -- > Thanks, > Alex. > > On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 12:23 PM 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 --------------------------------------------------- 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