[consulting] Responsibility for Mistakes

[Shai Gluskin]

Folks,

I have a client with a pretty sophisticated Organic Groups set-up which I
developed for them. One module I've included is Organic Groups Mailing List
<http://drupal.org/project/og_mailinglist>to provide the ability for people
to read and post via email instead of having to go to the web site.

The client is a non-profit with a pretty small staff and no one who has
particularly been "turned on" by Drupal and eager to learn. My average
monthly work for them is about 3-5 hours and that is a stretch for them.

For membership management they use Salsa <http://www.salsalabs.com/>. They
need to regularly migrate new members from Salsa to a specific organic
group for members (other more specific organic groups exist as well on the
site).

Given their limitation of highly qualified staff, I recommended adding the
members one at a time through the UI; there would only be, on average,
25/week. That was not acceptable to them. So I agreed to train them over
the phone how to do bulk upgrades, and then write it up into a doc. I used
user_import and OG user import.

The reception mode for the OG Mailing List is defaulted to "email" so that
when people sign up for specific OGs they will get the emails associated
with that OG. But for the general membership OG they wanted the default set
to "no email". Individual users could turn it on, but they didn't want new
members flooded with email.

In the phone training I had warned them that they needed to be careful with
the default setting. I told them: "Change the default setting for OG
Mailing List Subscriptions from 'email' to 'no email' *before* you do the
user import. After the import, switch it back from 'no email' to 'email.'"
However, in the written docs, *I inadvertently left that step out.* Oops!

185 people have since been added over the last six weeks... with no
complaints... until a hot topic arose and there were about 8 emails over
two days. They had lots of angry new members. They called and I was able to
diagnose the problem quickly. I was able to mass change people's
subscription mode from "email" to "no mail". But between the frantic phone
calls, explaining, troubleshooting, diagnosing, testing, solving, checking
server email logs, writing emails explaining in detail what happened etc...
I've spent 4.75 hours on it.

On the one hand, I want to take responsibility. I have a lot of pride in my
work. On the other hand, I feel like they really need to own their web
site. They neither have a budget to hire me for more hours nor do they have
anyone in-house who is inspired to learn this stuff. And when I suggested
they add the new members "by hand" they rejected that out of hand. And
there is the fact that I DID mention this step in the phone call.

Questions I need help with:

   1. Would you charge them for the full 4.75 hours?
   2. If you would provide a discount, how much off would you take?
   3. What tone or approach would you take when discussing this with the
   client?
   4. I find, as a solo practitioner, it is hard for me to "proofread" my
   work... and clients are so tight on their budgets. Anybody have ideas about
   how I can improve my quality control?

Also note, I really like a lot about this client and want to keep the
business, even though I'm frustrated that they don't have more skilled
people managing the web site.

Thanks so much for reading and if you have any thoughts, for sharing.

Sincerely,

Shai Gluskin

Content2zero Web Development
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