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 <
plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> 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+
> ---------------------------------------------------
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