Hey Eric, At GW we've been doing some cost estimates for projects. Essentially we pull together the team, figure out the different tasks that need to be accomplished, determine who will be working on those tasks, estimate hours necessary to do the work, and then use salaries to calculate the cost.
Right now we're primarily doing this for digitization projects, but I've had experience doing this at other jobs (not in libraries) with dev projects. There are a couple of caveats to this though: - *estimating time takes practice to perfect*. a lot of the time people aren't really sure how long something is going to take until they've started thinking about how long things actually take. and really, you'll only know how long things take if you keep track of your time. that can open up a can of worms, but in this case i like to frame it as you're just doing it to ensure that a project isn't more work than you expected. - *ensure that you're organized up front*. as anyone can tell you, scope creep kills a project. before you begin estimates you'll want to make sure that you know what the scope of the project is. its important to sit down with the group you're charging and really discuss the project. we use tito's project one pagers to outline what it is that we're doing and what it is that we're not doing. sitting down and talking to the stakeholders helps us really understand what they want, and provides us with the opportunity to say no if something is impossible, takes too long given the deadline, or whatever. If you want, I have some spreadsheets that I use to create estimates. I'm happy to send them your way. And if you want I can skype with you or something and talk you through what they each do (because I don't think its readily apparent). Let me know, Rosy --------------------------------------------------- Digital Project Manager Gelman Library The George Washington University f: 202.994.7439 On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Eric Larson <elar...@library.wisc.edu>wrote: > Any academic libraries out there doing consulting or application > development work for hire on their campuses? -- not freebie work, but where > actual money exchanges across campus accounting lines. > > I would be curious to hear how you go about pricing out your services, or > if you have a selection process for the work you choose to perform. > > Cheers, > - Eric > > -- > Eric Larson > > Web Application Developer > Shared Development Group > University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries > elar...@library.wisc.edu >
