ARBP members should log into the ARBP Members site and click on the “2009 ARBP Consultant Survey” link under the ARBP Info menu.

Non-ARBP members can take the survey at http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?A185E9F5A2E6F0F6

Some of the preliminary results are interesting because in last years survey we didn’t stop the survey if you said you didn’t consider yourself a consultant and this led to a lot of answers about pricing and employees being skewed.  This year non self-declared consultants do not take a majority of the survey.  We also refined some of the questions to include more details.

If you haven’t already, I would appreciate it if you could take the survey.  The results help ARBP determine who our users are and in the long run it helps the RB consulting community by giving some baseline numbers for comparison.

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?

Today we released Task Timer version 4.1.  It has some nifty new features for Mac OS X users including the ability to start/stop timers from the menubar (even when it’s not at the forefront) and from the dock menu.  We also added some charting capabilities so that it’s easy to tell if you’re spending too much time on a project (or product).  Sometimes this is good, sometimes it’s bad to know all this.

Task Timer was our very first product.  Written initially in the REALbasic 5.5 era.  The database it used back then was horrible.  If the app crashed while the db was open it was hosed and the only way to fix it was to use a utility to fix it.  Another version came out when RS change the database format and yet another version came out when it finally became SQLite based.

With version 4 we did a complete rewrite from the ground up.  It needed it.  I’ve learned a few things about REALbasic since then and there are some much better controls available.  Reporting was another big thing in version 4.  We went from using a StyleGrid printer to using RSReport.  Trust me, RSReport is light years ahead of what we were doing before.  In the 4.1 version we added charting which was pretty easy to do using the MonkeyBread ChartDirector plugin.  Both 3rd party items are welcome additions into the BKeeney Software stable of tools.

If you try any of the BKeeney Software products I talked about above and want to purchase, please use the coupon code BRIEFS to get a 25% discount off the purchase price! The coupon is good through July 1, 2009.