[consulting] Professionalism

[Christian Pearce]

There is a time a place for adding to a project.  If it is a bid, I think
you need to protect yourself.  Especially if it is a new client.  You need
to have enough in reserve to cover modest scope changes that could be
interpreted either way.

Further if a client wants to make sure they are going to get a fixed rate
they are going to pay a bit of a premium on that.

I spoke with some a general contractor with a construction company I hired.
He said when he is faced putting in a fixed bid for a renovation he will
triple his estimate cause he just doesn't know what he will find.

When it comes to estimate I make sure I put in time for the intangibles
people never think about, such as time on phone with the client, training,
documentation, integration issues, etc.  Starting with a new client I
encourage them to start small with us, see how we handle a small project.
Then they can feel more comfortable working time and materials.

Clients are always happy to have us come in under budget.  If fact often the
remainder of the budget is spent on other parts of the site.  This is
clearly a lot harder on project running 3-6 months.  Clients usually don't
have the patience to work through proper design specs.


On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Sam Tresler <sam at treslerdesigns.com> wrote:

> I will be most curious in hearing how long this job ends up taking in
> reality.  Part of me despises over-bidding just for the sake of
> overbidding.  The other part of me has spent 2/3rds of my web career
> cleaning up after the low-bidders.
>
> -S
>
>
>
> On Nov 24, 2009, at 2:42 PM, Fred Jones wrote:
>
> >> I work with someone on a Drupal 6 site and he hired a fancy NYC
> >> company (that charges well over $100 / hour) to do some more work on
> >> the site. The client asked me to write up a certain job and include
> >> some time estimates. Part of it is a custom node template, based on a
> >> PSD. The site template remains the same--this node template is just
> >> to
> >> customize the content section. OK, it may involve a *bit* of PHP for
> >> special fields, but it's still just a node template.
> >>
> >> I estimated 3 hours and the NYers 33 hours. They estimate over $3300
> >> to make one node template!
> >
> > Thanks everyone for the comments--some were quite interesting.
> >
> > I would like to add that this firm was already hired and did a few
> > small jobs for this site, so the relationship already exists, as does
> > a bit of knowledge of the site. The page in question is indeed complex
> > and is more than just a node template. The other programmer broke it
> > down into a dozen tasks, including building special functionality.
> > Making the node template was just one step in the puzzle. His total
> > time was 15 hours for the full job.
> >
> > Their total was 130 hours for the whole thing. They added that those
> > estimates may be conservative but they see no way it can be done in
> > less than 80 hours.
> >
> > The *client* agreed that such an estimate is ridiculous.
> >
> > F
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-- 
Christian
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