Mystical Science of Professional Svcs Rates & Fee Structures
No matter what anyone else is gonna tell you, mgt and business consulting rates and fees are ultimately arbitrary. Despite the mother-of-all-excel-spreadsheets in the appendix purporting to support them. Srsly. Therez no real "rate card". Therez only "what we'd like to get" and "what you'll actually pay". Hopefully we can meet somewhere in the middle. With a lot of diligently documented assumptions. And since i know that you blanch at the word 'contingency', and that extra 5 FTE days seems negotiable to you ("risk?!? what risk?!?"), i will simply pad the expected task durations by 10 - 15 %. Strictly to accommodate for your shortcomings and inability to meet my delivery schedule, btw, so that any time i burn while Japan/Asia or some other region comes up with lame excuses for why they won't review/test/or sign-off on my frikkin brilliant deliverables ("ooh we have an office move this week" or "next week is golden dragon week, all week vacation in tokyo") is somehow paid for and i don't miss MY frikkin utilization targets and project margins...
Google is Not a Guru
It surprises me more and more the things that people hope to learn from a google search:
- Yeah, dammit, where is it?
- Oh man, i wish i knew too.
- If there are any search phrases that should be in ALL CAPS, this is one of them.
- Learning more than you seem to already know about whatever it is you seem to have is only delaying the inevitable. Dude, save some time and search for a doctor straightaway.
- This sounds like a question for Mithras. As does this.
Crushed by the Onerous Weight of My Livelihood
For me there's always this point when i am back at work following a vacation that i actually wish i hadn't taken time off at all because of all the crap i missed and have to clean up or catch up on. I can rate how good a vacation was by how long it takes before i find myself saying "shit, i'm never taking off again" upon my return. This time it took three days of work which is pretty much a record. So the vacation must have been a pretty good one. I floated through Tues, Wed and most of Thursday still immersed in some dream that there is a world outside of my client and project. But by the Thurs 10:30pm call with AsiaPac (which followed the 8:30p - 10p with Tokyo, i might add... all of which was on top off beginning the morning at 6am in Phili, a 6hr design session with business SMEs at one site, a flurried debrief meeting at another, and then car/train/car back to NYC) rolled around, the entirety of my soul and lifeforce had been sucked out of me.
Today, i woke up with my "they're happy i even show up" attitude on and sauntered into the office late. Doing the math, for billing and whatnot, i realized that somehow i had managed to have a 45 hr workweek in just three days. Bastards!! So i conscientiously spent the last half of the day on non-billable, administrative tasks (gotta keep my utilization steady babee):
