Process: DesignOps

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced my idea for a scoping and estimating tool that emphasizes transparency, puts the customer in control, and focuses on the work outcomes for piecework rather than hourly rates. Now, in Part 2, I’ll present a tutorial for creating this tool, while providing some theory on crafting a service business.

To build an estimation tool that meets your own needs, follow these steps:

1. Identify the services you’ll provide.
2. Perform a time-and-motion study for delivering each of these services.
3. Quantize and assign a price to each of your deliverables. (I use the term quantize to refer to the process of converting the value of a deliverable from an hourly rate to a discrete unit of work.)
4. Build a spreadsheet that includes each quantized element.
5. Refine the spreadsheet as necessary. Read More

One of the greatest challenges of running a service business is balancing your labor costs against clients’ true needs. Addressing a complex business problem can require significantly more resources than addressing a simple one. Complex problems often require more time, higher-paid employees, or both. Complicating matters further, clients want to know how much to budget and the extent to which that budget will be accurate throughout the course of a project. But complex projects, by their nature, are extremely difficult to predict up front. Of course, clients want to get the most value for their money, so they’ll want to reduce costs whenever possible, making estimating even more challenging.

When you put all these challenges together, it’s not too surprising to see service projects failing to meet client expectations, running over budget, or delivering outcomes of far lower value than anyone had hoped. While the approach to estimating that I’ve been discussing throughout this series of articles won’t solve all of these problems, it does eliminate a couple of them by

• keeping the client in control of costs throughout the project—even when scope changes
• removing dependencies on hourly rates Read More

As software products have expanded over the decades, companies have had to apply a fair amount of effort to managing their customers’ experience. Since companies have added more and more features and functions to their software products, customer engagement has begun to fluctuate. Managing customers’ expectations had become complicated. These products have continued to grow because customers desired more features and the software companies wanted to offer more value—for a nominal fee, of course. Now, these companies confront the challenge not only of how to design and build the new features but also how to manage and release them.

Several companies—for example, Google—have managed these changes fairly well, but many have a lot of room for improvement. The days are over when we can honestly say, “If we build it, they will come.” We must do the work necessary to truly understand our customers’ needs. If we understood our customers, we would understand that we can’t just jam new features or functions into our software and expect customers joyfully to accept them. Read More