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@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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