Hi Rosy,
Thanks for your reply. I would greatly appreciate seeing your
spreadsheets.
We do an honorable amount of project estimation and time-tracking
here, too. We always draft a "Memorandum of Understanding" -- an
agreement for what work the library will provide on the project and a
timetable for completing said work -- with our digital collection
project clients. We try hard to stay focused on the deliverables in
that document, but there's always some feature creep in development
work.
We do not have plans to "charge back" for development services, but
wondered if other schools worked in such a way. The recent success of
our new library catalog launch and future digital collection platform
(Hi Blacklight folk) has momentarily increased interest in our born-
digital digital collection efforts. There's also a campus-wide effort
here at UW-Madison to raise awareness for "Educational Innovation"
opportunities that might generate new revenue streams for the
university. We're not used to charging for our services in the
library, but some hypothetical partnerships could present the
opportunity. I'm sure other public institutions are doing similar
what-if revenue exercises:
http://edinnovation.wisc.edu/
Thanks again and I'll ping you off list to chat more.
Cheers,
- Eric
On Jun 6, 2012, at 11:28 AM, Rosalyn Metz wrote:
Hey Eric,
At GW we've been doing some cost estimates for projects.
Essentially we
pull together the team, figure out the different tasks that need to be
accomplished, determine who will be working on those tasks, estimate
hours
necessary to do the work, and then use salaries to calculate the cost.
Right now we're primarily doing this for digitization projects, but
I've
had experience doing this at other jobs (not in libraries) with dev
projects. There are a couple of caveats to this though:
- *estimating time takes practice to perfect*. a lot of the time
people
aren't really sure how long something is going to take until they've
started thinking about how long things actually take. and really,
you'll
only know how long things take if you keep track of your time.
that can
open up a can of worms, but in this case i like to frame it as
you're just
doing it to ensure that a project isn't more work than you expected.
- *ensure that you're organized up front*. as anyone can tell you,
scope creep kills a project. before you begin estimates you'll
want to
make sure that you know what the scope of the project is. its
important to
sit down with the group you're charging and really discuss the
project. we
use tito's project one pagers to outline what it is that we're
doing and
what it is that we're not doing. sitting down and talking to the
stakeholders helps us really understand what they want, and
provides us
with the opportunity to say no if something is impossible, takes
too long
given the deadline, or whatever.
If you want, I have some spreadsheets that I use to create
estimates. I'm
happy to send them your way. And if you want I can skype with you or
something and talk you through what they each do (because I don't
think its
readily apparent).
Let me know,
Rosy
---------------------------------------------------
Digital Project Manager
Gelman Library
The George Washington University
f: 202.994.7439
On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Eric Larson
<[email protected]>wrote:
Any academic libraries out there doing consulting or application
development work for hire on their campuses? -- not freebie work,
but where
actual money exchanges across campus accounting lines.
I would be curious to hear how you go about pricing out your
services, or
if you have a selection process for the work you choose to perform.
Cheers,
- Eric
--
Eric Larson
Web Application Developer
Shared Development Group
University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries
[email protected]
--
Eric Larson
Digital Library Consultant
UW Digital Collections Center
[email protected]
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