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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