Consultants ...

[Snyder, Alexander J]

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 <
plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> 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 <
> plug-discuss at 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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