- Wed Jun 12, 2019 9:23 pm
#824864
If you do online consulting (I did a bit 5 years ago), you will get everything from programmers who just want you to answer very hard questions, to requests to make plugins, to businesses that want you to design their processes for them, but they haven't though very deeply about what they need, so you will spend a lot of time working with them to figure out what they need.
With the latter, you should tell them up front that you can't work for a fixed price, and they should pay you an hourly wage, or tell them that you will deliver what they specified on day 1 for a set price, but you will charge an hourly rate for any additional changes. It is always a good idea to write up a description of what was discussed on day 1, so both of you have it in writing and it is clear what you are agreeing to do. It is normal for businesses to discover that they need to make changes in their processes, and you need to make it clear that additional changes that they request later will cost them extra. Also, make sure to include training in the cost estimate, because you will probably spend a couple hours showing them how to use the processes that you create for them and answering questions.
I preferred working with clients who had already figured out how to use ProcessMaker, and needed help with the technical bits, since they had a much clearer idea what they needed, and they understood the value of the triggers and JavaScript that I wrote for them. With the clients who didn't know exactly what they wanted, I took two approaches, since I didn't want to sit through long meetings with them, discussing how their businesses functioned. I either gave them a two hour introduction to using ProcessMaker, so they could design the basic layout of their processes and the forms themselves, or I had them create a list of tasks, documents and forms that they needed and a list of the fields that they wanted in each form, and I answered their questions about what was possible. That forced them to do the hard thinking and discussions in their business about what they needed.
Until they had figured out what they needed, they wasted a lot of my time, so I tried to avoid that as much as possible, by forcing them to figure it out before I did much work. You can take the opposite approach, and be a consultant who guides them through designing their processes. Some business owners want to talk to somebody about what they currently do and figure out what would be a better way to do it with ProcessMaker. If you decide to play that role, be prepared for several long meetings with the client, and include that in your cost estimate. Most clients don't want to pay an hourly rate, so you will have to guesstimate how much time you will spend in those meetings, which is very hard to know beforehand. For that reason, I always tried to overestimate when the client wanted a fixed price for the entire project.
Most clients don't want to pay an hourly rate, because it is hard for them to plan the budget, but that was a big problem for clients who didn't know exactly what they wanted, so I couldn't estimate the total project cost. In those situations, I would say to the client: "I'll do X hours of work with you at Y price to figure out exactly what you need and start designing your processes, and then I'll present you a full project estimate. At that point you can either accept my proposal to finish the project or you can take my initial work and use it to contract with another consultant, because you will have a better idea what work you need done."
Most clients appreciated that approach, because it didn't lock them in, and I liked it, because it reduced the risk that I would underestimate the amount of work needed to complete a project.
My two cents, for what they're worth. If you have done consulting before, then you probably know all this, but I didn't when I started.
- By stevesmith27