We provide experts to work directly with you to complete your project. They will do exactly what you ask and we simply charge you per hour/day for their time.
Although it might be tempting to go with a supplier that will take on your project at a fixed price, this will often result in:
- A higher cost, and
- An outcome that is less fit for purpose
This article explains why.
We grew out of an earlier company (HCi Consulting) that started in 1981. Over the years we’ve moved from fixed price quotations (1981-2004) to flexible resourcing (2004-present).
Back when we did fixed price, the process we would go through when a client asked for a fixed price quotation (and we did hundreds) was as follows:
- Spend a week on a detailed plan of the deliverable
- Work out how much time it would take to build
- Multiply that by our hourly rate
- Add a risk percentage
- Quote (time x rate) add risk percentage as the fixed price
The risk percentage would vary from 25% up to 100%, depending on how difficult we thought the client would be to deal with.
During delivery, if the client wanted to change the specification, we’d add a variation to the cost to adjust the price.
We’d also include a bunch of caveats, like:
- Only two drafts of each section
- Reviews must be returned within three working days
- Requests for client input must be responded to within three working days
The reason? Well the amount of time involved in building a module/chapter depends more on the client than it does on the builder. If a client decides to go on holiday for two weeks in the middle of a build, but not change the delivery deadline, then that makes it difficult to deliver on time. If a client decides to give arbitrary review comments (our favourite was “Improve this”!) then it made the build difficult, or even impossible, to complete.
About 20 years ago we found that out clients stopped using our fixed price quotations. They would take our detailed plans and then hire writers directly to do the build. So we moved away from fixed price quotations to the system we use currently: flexible resourcing.
The basic rules are:
- We provide the person/people to do the build
- They work under your direct control
- We charge for their time by the hour/day
This means that:
- If the build goes faster, you pay less
- If you want changes, there are no extra charges (other than the time to make the change)
- You have complete flexibility in how you work with the developers
In addition we have an ‘any time, no cause’ termination, which means that if you decide in the middle of the project that you don’t want to continue with one or more of the writers/IDs, then you stop paying for them right then.
We provide the project resources for you to manage, and we’re also ready to help with advice and support. After all, we’ve been running projects like this since 1981.
