Consultants ...

[techlists at phpcoderusa.com]

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
> <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+
>>> ---------------------------------------------------
>>> PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss at 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 at 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 at lists.phxlinux.org
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss