Consultants ...

[techlists at phpcoderusa.com]

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 <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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