The import of the old Brief’s didn’t go nearly as well as we had hoped. We’ll start filling in the missing entries as time goes on.
Also, sorry for all the Twitter posts, didn’t think the import would do that.
I’m a Mac user. I have been since 1986 and even in my electrical engineering days I always had a Mac at home while I slaved away on a Windows machine at work. Get over it.
I think it’s time to move on though. Windows XP has such lousy performance with threading that I’m almost tempted to pull support of XP for one of my apps that uses a lot of threads. What’s taking mere minutes in Vista (and half that time in Mac OS X!) to complete is taking a whole lot more minutes under XP. Both environments are running in VMWare with the same allotted RAM and running on the same drive with nothing else on the Mac running.
As much as I hate the UI changes (I can’t give specific’s it just feels slightly off-kilter!) the performance increase is enough for me to start using it more and more. XP, I’m kicking you to the curb for good I think. I’ll still use you to kick the tires on app testing but no more of your crappy performance.
Estimates aren’t very easy. In fact, I’d say that it’s the hardest part of being a consultant because of the time and effort that goes into making a decent estimate. It’s really just an educated guess.
Think about it for a second. You’re being asked to figure out how much time and money it will take do something without actually doing the work. And in most cases a client has given you a vague, rough idea of what they want. If you’re lucky.
If you’re unlucky, the client has an OPC (Other Peoples Code) project that they’re bringing to you to fix. What’s even worse, they give you a paragraph of what the application does, with no specifics, and expect it to be done quickly and cheaply and correctly.
The other thing that sucks about estimates is knowing that we humans are notoriously bad at determining how much time something will take. We’re good at estimating a lot of things but time estimates are ephemeral at best. I started my career as an electrical engineering doing project engineering work. It only took a few small projects (and getting chewed out when my estimates were horrible) to realize that my ‘it only takes a day to do that’ estimate turned into three days (or more).
So I have my multiply by three rule. Take your estimate, which is really the ‘if everything works perfectly the first time and I can devote 100% of my day to it’ estimate and then multiply by your reality factor.
The real trick is learning from your past successes and mistakes. Now that I have a standard tool set of classes, controls and modules that I’ve used on a dozens of projects it’s easy to say that adding ‘X’ is 15 minutes worth of work and the reality factor is 1.5. Creating new controls, since it has a high degree of initial failure, might have a reality factor of 2 to 3. If you have a feeling that a client is going to be really picky, maybe that reality factor goes up a little. If the project requirement details are scarce the factor goes up again.
Trust your gut on this one folks. The figure at the bottom of the spreadsheet seems high sometimes. You’ll be tempted to lower some estimates to make it more palatable to the client. Sometimes you might have to do that to get the job, but try to resist the temptation. As a consultant your pricing is based on what your time and experience are worth along with all the other things that go into being a business. You have overhead, marketing, taxes, insurance, and you have a retirement plan, right?
So what’s your Reality Factor?