Quote:
Originally Posted by mikester
3) Always bid the job, not the hours.
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Be careful with this one. I've been a consultant for 15+ years, and there are some aspects of some jobs that HAVE to be done on time and materials basis, not a "spec" or set-price fee.
I'm sure you're aware that in IT, ***** happens, so if you bid the job, and it goes sideways, you'll eat it.
Most of my jobs are a mixture of T&M and Spec.
While I do a lot of systems architecture work, I've been involved in a few network setup and config work. There have been a couple of failover situations that seemed pretty simple, in theory, but resulted in absolute nightmares due to various things like vendor incompatibilities for standard protocols (BGP), etc.
We took an extra 2 weeks to get one config tested and implemented as we had to get the vendors involved (F5 and Cisco) and write some patches for us.
I'm glad I didn't have to work for free to get it done.
Sure, it sucks that the client had to pay the extra, but sometimes that's what happens.
$0.02