 Fantastic. Thank you very much everyone. Great to see so many people here. It's funny how the room thing, we had like a dozen people in the big room up there before and this thing was packed, but yeah. Anyway, what's electronic signage for? Okay, so this is going to be an interesting sort of thing because obviously I based this session on a song, which is 50 Ways to Leave Your Love Up by Paul Simon. And I only realized the other day when I was typing in the year into iTunes and stuff that it's actually 1975 song and everything. So who's Paul Simon? Hands up, who's heard of Paul Simon? Oh, there we go. Fantastic. Okay, that's good. Okay, so we'll get to the song. I was playing through the video before just so it's refreshed in your memory. I'm managing Director Glow Digital. That is my contact info. This is our new branding, our new website that went up last night and everything. We've got a guy talking about responsive design, so we figured, gee, we better have a responsive site by the time DrupalCon comes around, so check it out sometime. We're also sponsoring coffee, and you must, this is my little spiel, you must enter our competition to win an iPad Mini as well. So to do that, you have to look in your program guide and do the appropriate folding to make that response, to make our little program add responsive, you'll get the gist of it. And there's a QR code on the cups that you have to take a pic of to enter. Okay, I like music, tennis, and photography, and that is a rock in my backyard. There you go. Why not? Okay, so 10 ways to cost Drupal projects. Now, there are a million ways to cost them, and really, it's not so much about the costing, it's about the situations that you encounter that you have to interpret and then work out, well, how the heck am I going to approach this? So really, it's kind of more like 10 situations that you need to come up with the costing in with various different conditions. So it's really what my 10 lines of the song cover. So we'll get to the song in a minute. The 10 ways are listed thus, and I'm going to go into these in some detail. You can just read that for yourself. I've got a fair bit of material to go through. I'm not quite sure how long it'll take, so I might speed up or slow down. And any questions probably will wait to the end, and we'll try to leave you a fair bit of time at the end for some questions and discussion, and I'm interested in input from you as well. Because I'm sure, okay, we have to do the mandatory hands up thing. Okay, so hands up who runs a Drupal agency and develops websites for people. Great, thank you very much. There's quite a few. Hands up who develops websites internally for their own company. Excellent, fantastic. So it's about sort of a, almost a 50-50 there, which is fantastic. Okay, so the 10 ways. Well, it's not covered lots and stuff. So yeah, by all means, we'll have a bit of a discussion later. Okay, here he is in the 70s. Scary stuff. Complete with the appropriate moe. This is a more recent shot of Paul Simon. And I was playing the music before, but look, I'll play a little bit now and I have to rewind here. Always dangerous playing video from within our point, isn't it? And I'm going to move it along. Just read that. It's 50 ways. Okay, so that'll do for now. Okay, we're going to hear snippets of that again in a minute. So on with the 10 ways. Okay, so what I've got here is for each of the 10 ways to cost a project, I've got a little line of the song. So let's see if this actually works. Again, very brave doing PowerPoint from. Make a new plan stand. Okay, make a new plan stand. Okay, that's the short name. The long name for way number one is entire project from conception using a methodology with a paid discovery phase. Okay, a few problems already. What are those terms? And I want to spend a bit of time on some of these terms because it's critical to how we're going to approach this thing. Okay, so a project from conception means that you start at the beginning where the client in theory has an idea of what they want to achieve and they probably have lots of suggestions about how to achieve things. And I'm sure you'll agree that projects from conception are projects that everyone loves. Okay, who are developers here, please? Lots of developers and everything. Is there any type of project that you love more than a new project from conception? Any hands? Oh, really? Support. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, there you go. Okay, very important support. But most people like new stuff. Greenfields. But also, company owners like projects from conception because they tend to be a bit larger, I guess, gets the whole team involved. And project managers like them because, again, they get to work with Greenfield. Developers love them because, yeah, the world's their oyster. And really, everyone likes the idea of conception, I think. Okay, but few projects really are from conception, really. It's very rare that you'll find a client comes to you and says, I've got this wad of money I want to give to you. Can you please create a plan for me with using your best practice and just make it happen? Well, at least in my experience, that's kind of rare. Usually they come up with, you know, yeah, okay, we'll get to that. So, in reality, really, they come to you with a list of things that they need. They come to you with solutions for their problems and everything. So they say, right, I need a blog. I need an event management system or something like that. And you really have to say, whoa, there, Bessie, stop and we'll find out actually what your business problems are in order to be able to solve those. So you've really got to find out, you've really got to get past what they think the project is about and really reassess that yourself. They might come to you with some design ideas. Okay, one more show of hands here and I promise to try not to do any more after this. Who has had a client who has strong opinions about the design? Okay, everyone. That's very impressive. And often designers will tell you, user experience experts will tell you that really they have to go back to the start as well and ask the client, well really, what are your goals? What are we trying to achieve? So really, and the functionality needed as well, the client has a list of things that they want you to implement, of course. And they really need to unlearn all of those things. Using methodology. So methodology is a guideline system for solving a problem with specific components such as phases, tasks, methods, techniques and tools. The reason I'm going to this level on a methodology is because it's really, really critical that you understand that you have a methodology and that you understand it well enough to be able to quote your projects well because the quote depends very much on your methodology in the case of Greenfield's projects. Typical steps in a methodology sort of these days, it's hard to find information on methodologies because people think that they're secrets and don't want to give it to the competition and what have you. So really if you look it up on the web it's kind of hard to find. But these are some typical steps. Discovery phase, content strategy stuff, design construction law and post-launch. So those things are about design is typically your project brief, work out your goals, you might have some stakeholder interviews, do some user research, user types, goals, personas, scenarios potentially and reviews as well. So review the existing site, review the marketing strategy, review the branding, review the competition. Discovery phase, the reason I wanted to go into such detail on that is because it is critical for Greenfield's projects. Your content strategy, typically that'll be information architecture, i.e. site map and other stuff. Wireframe diagrams, maybe responsive layouts, breakpoints, etc., implementation strategy which is how you put things together in Drupal. Design will typically be user experience stuff, maybe Photoshop layouts if you still use that. Style tiles, really interesting concept. You want to hear from phase two? If you go to styletill.es which spells style tiles, it's a fascinating concept for preventing you from needing to come up with an entire website design to Photoshop, you can just really come out with the design elements. A little bit like if you go shopping in a bathroom sale store or something, you basically grab a tile, you put it next to some material next to some carpet and stuff. It's a top concept developed by someone whose name I forget who used to work for phase two technology. Design, construction will be building the site. That's what most people here actually know something about. Launching it, setting up database, CDN, potentially deployment documentation, training go live, etc. And post launch stuff, which is a gamut of variety of things including promotional activities, support and maintenance contract or SLA. A review of both the project process and the outcomes, measure the outcomes, metrics and potentially continued education as well. So there are typical steps, and as I said before it's pretty hard to actually find examples from the internet, but here's one. I don't know this company, Creative Stride, anyone heard of them? They're in the States somewhere? Yeah, you have? Right, you've heard everything. But this was good, I thought, because this did have those elements. I don't know if you can read that properly, but it has a lot of that stuff that I was just talking about in slightly different words, but very important elements, all of those. By the way, the slides for this session and all sessions are going to be made available on the website all in one batch together, presumably sometime tomorrow. Here's another one, Envision Interactive. I don't know these companies, but these are the only couple that I could really find that actually listed a bit about their methodology. And one more as well. So methodology, what I've talked about so far in terms of methodology has been sort of a pretty comprehensive sort of thing. Here's one that is a little bit on the other end of the scale. From Nick's site, step one, ask yourself what am I really trying to achieve? Step two, step three, step four, that's it. Cute. So really a methodology is whatever you decide is going to be a working practice to get things done. And that is up to you. That's not the topic of this talk. The topic of this talk is how to cost, how to put a price on what you're going to be asking for. And I'm still explaining the term, the meaning behind Making New Plans at Stan with a paid discovery phase. So before we talked about the discovery phase having various components and the idea is that it uncovers enough information to plan and cost the project properly. And of course the actual steps in the discovery phase are probably going to include some of the things I mentioned before, but it will depend on how you go about doing your projects. And some people call it other things, a study, a project evaluation, and a scoping of the terms that I've heard before. A scoping exercise. So the big advantage with I guess having a Greenfields project with a paid discovery phase is that it gives you a huge opportunity to actually discover what the project is about without making a significant expenditure. You'll see in a minute the second way to quote projects is very similar to the first way, but there's no paid discovery phase. In other words the client comes to you and says hey we want a site, give us a full proposal. And you really have to kind of make guesses. We'll get to that in a minute. So the advantage is that we know what the project's about and then really we cost it in two phases. The first phase being we charge or quote the client for the discovery phase only. Once they're happy with that we understand what the project is about. It's much easier to quote the rest of the project of course. It's just common sense really. Okay so will the client pay for a discovery phase? And you know I've lost a slide here. I was editing these the other day. There's one more thing I wanted to say and I'll find the reference later. One of the names for the discovery phase was a project evaluation and I'll fix the slides and post an updated version. There's a great story. Oh maybe it's actually coming up there. I see it's coming up. There it is. This is a great article. It's just fantastic. And it's about project proposals. So just forgive me. I'll just read this. It's a fascinating thing. This is posted on Smashing Magazine. After several grueling days I'd finally finish the proposal. Tell me if you relate to this. I sent it off and waited for response. Nothing. After a few weeks I discovered that they were just looking in inverted commas. Despite the urgency and aggressive timeline for the RFP, plus the fact that we had done business with this organisation before, the project was a no-go. My days of effort were wasted. Not entirely though because the pain of that loss was enough to drive me to decide that it wouldn't happen again. Holy moly who's been there. Yeah okay lots of hands. Great article. I really encourage you to read that. There it is actually. Stop writing project proposals and my subtitle is start writing evaluations. So they call that discovery phase. A project evaluation and they charge the client for it. Marvelous idea. Will they pay for it? That's the question. My comments are, if they're serious about the project, they'll pay for it. If they really want a half-baked solution, they should simply ask for an entire project from conception. Vesa Palmo was here just before. Popped his head in and stuff. He was talking about agile processes and that was really, really interesting. He was saying that agile processes are really great, especially for large projects. For smaller projects you can kind of plan the whole thing through and things tend not to go wrong. Or if they do go wrong, they don't have such an impact. Large projects, something goes wrong, they have big impacts. So wouldn't your client really, don't they need a head read if they don't actually take the project seriously and do an initial study before going any further? And the other thing is, do you really want them if they don't pay for it? Hmm. Okay. So options for costing the discovery of the project size. There's lots of ways to do this. You can have a standard cost in theory, so you could just say, right, my typical website size is such and such and you can say, right, two grand, two grand a pop, or something if most of your projects are similar. You could say variable costs sort of based on your feel for the project size. Now this word feel, I wanted to put in inverted commas because that's important in these matters and we'll get back to that in a minute. Maybe a percentage of the estimated project size chicken and the egg there, how do you work out how big your project is before you kind of find out about it. Feel has something to do with that, chatting to the client. And potentially you could go all the way and actually do a detailed costing for your discovery phase. So there's lots of options there. Often, you know, in the first couple of minutes of talking to a client you will get a feel for how big a project is. And you can sort of say you could actually present a price with conditions saying for a typical project that is going to take 120 hours or something to work on, we charge this much. If it turns out to be more than this, we'll charge this much more for the extra. Pretty easy. Now I wanted to talk about feel. Feel is important in these ways. To work out the overall project size, as I said to work out what the client is going to be likely to deal with. Three, to work out what they're likely to pay. And it's all I think. Also when you look at the smashing magazine article, check out comment 147 as well. It's really pertinent and in fact I'm going to read this one as well. I don't have it up here but it goes like it says this. I've been in this industry 17 years and have had similar issues. We now don't bother with RFPs and now I'm very bold when someone needs three to five quotes. I ask in advance if they are getting competitive bids. I ask if I get to address the decision makers. I explain this as a relationship, not a one time service, and let them know it can take one to two days to engineer a quote. I ask point blank if they are serious about doing business with me. If it feels right feel. And without question my intuition is usually correct. Hopefully that comes after experience. I decide to create the proposal or to turn it down. So this feel thing is really important because for this guy, the feel of whether a client sounds right for him, the decision depends on feel. Wow. Okay. Also I saw an interview of Mark Bolton on Bogue World and for the life of me I really can't find it now. It was a podcast and he was saying that his relationship, Mark Bolton by the way is the guy who helped redesign Drupal homepage for Drupal 7. Was it 7? Yeah. Current version. Anyone heard of Mark Bolton? I think he redesigned the logo and everything. Yeah. Tough job with a bunch of developers. And his opinion was that his relationship with the client has to feel right and everything. And if it doesn't he actually knocks them back. Which is kind of hard if you need the money but often you're better off actually not entering into a bad relationship in the first place. If you know it's not going to be good. I'll give you another example as well of feel. Just because I think feel is so important. One of our, we have a client in Brisbane, one of our client staff changed. So the person we dealt with on this system that we had developed in 2008 changed. And we dealt with the new person for enhancements in support. And interestingly enough when the site needed some particular enhancements our new client didn't want to tell us what their budget was. Instead they hinted that they were considering sort of outsourcing to China. Which gave me a very bad feel. Because we pride ourselves on high quality development and good quality processes. We have permanent staff in the office during office hours that they can talk to. And we can go around and see the client and everything. So really that started to feel like a bad match with the client. And the jury is still out about what will happen there. So my point, feel is important. Okay, now one thing I didn't test before I came on board here was whether my little, yes. Yeah, well I think that goes to experience to be honest. It's absolutely, you know. And the feel that you get really, once you get burned, you really get a feel for that situation again and you don't make the same mistake twice. Okay. So yeah, thanks for the question. Feel free to chime in, I reckon. That'll make it more interactive. How do you sell it to them? Yeah, I think you really need to actually list out all of the benefits for your own mind and everything with respect to your methodology. So I would actually make sure that A, I know my methodology and everything and B, I know what the advantages are. And you can also come to a couple of sessions tomorrow. There's a session by Philippe Rabim and another one by David Calcoli about dealing with government and dealing with corporate clients and stuff that actually talks a little bit about that. So I would actually, yeah, work that out and make sure you got a cheat sheet so when you talk to them you can actually do it. I know that's not really answering your question, but it really does depend on how it works. Okay. Now the one thing I didn't test here was Google Doc, which is not working. Oh, that's an image I really wanted to kind of go through it. So basically if we put it over here, there it is. Fantastic. Okay, so if I just swap back to my slide. You can follow along if you wish. If you've got a laptop there you can actually go in and have a look at this or you can do it later. It's a Google spreadsheet so it's multi-user access and I've made this publicly accessible. But I actually wanted to go through a bit of an example of what you can actually do to come up with a costing for the discovery phase. So I guess it's sort of related to your question as well. First of all, at the top oh yeah, and if you could, when you go into it you'll get a little purple or different color and everything. So if you cannot move around too much you won't distract from where I'm pointing. Okay, so you've got your rate card there. You've got your different people and you feel free to actually copy this as well from where it is. You've got your different roles. You may not have as many or you may have more roles. You can change the rates, etc. You have to decide on a contingency figure there and a project management overhead. And then you work out basically what your steps in your methodology in your discovery phase are. So you might have a project brief which uses a project manager resource at $100 an hour. They'll take two hours. Yeah, good luck with a cost of $200. So the same thing for the other roles for these different steps. Fill in your own methodology. You need to add some sort of contingency offer obviously. So I've chosen 10% there as a round number but you could be 50% on a small thing like this maybe. And add a project management fee. I always recommend to add those two items. Both a contingency figure and a project management fee. Because project management fee, the idea behind these here is you're putting in the hours that the actual work is going to take. So if there was a development phase here and we'll get to that, the hours that the developer has estimated probably multiplied by 1.5 or 2 if it's like other developers I know. Okay, so we have those and out pops at the bottom a total. So we're also separating it into optional components. So here in this methodology we've got eight hours optionally of advanced user research which might be some user testing or it might be user personas and scenarios for example. And often the client may or may not want to participate in that particular option. It's always also written another interesting article that talks about how it's great to give clients options. Okay, you give them like a vanilla version. You give them sort of a medium version and you give them say a super duper version and they can pick their options. And for some reason it just makes the client feel better because if they're a budget conscious person they'll probably go for the low one. If there's someone who just wants the B's knees they'll probably go for the high one. And if there's someone who is like quality but don't want to pay too much for it, they'll probably go for the middle one. Okay, there it is. Great. Okay, so that's just a screenprint of that and you can go have a look at it. Once the discovery phase is complete then let's say assume they actually said yes we will pay for that. And everyone was happy. The advantage is that quoting the rest of the project becomes easier because you know all about what's going to be involved in that project. And you got the history with the client. So they have an immediate trust in you and to be honest you have the inside running on the competition. Should they actually decide that they want to go out to tender or RFP they'll invite you for sure if you did a good job. And they'll invite maybe one or two other organizations but you've got the inside running because you know them and they have their trust in you. Okay, I said your methodology could be anything. What if it's agile? And did anyone attend Vesa Palmos talk before you? Great. It was interesting that I was speaking to them afterwards as well and I said how sorted do you really have the costing of the agile process. And he said about 50%. So I'm glad that you know someone who touts a lot of experience with agile methodology really hasn't got the quoting quite worked out yet. And there I saw a tweet from him some time ago that he's thinking about it which is great. I also saw a tweet today from Justin Freeman. Are you here? No, he's not here. Agile Weir and Canberra. Drupal shot down there. And he suggested maybe you're charged by the sprint. Okay, so if you have a weak sprint or something with you know three developers or something like that, potentially charged by the sprint and it sounds like a pretty good idea. We haven't done that before but I'd be interested in hearing anyone who has worked that out. Of course you'd have to actually sell the process to the client first. Sell them and Vesa talked about that. See ya. So for the audio recording come up here and talk into my neck. Please. What did you say again? You distracted me. Yeah, okay for projects that generally cost a bit more. Yeah, look I'm showing you figures here and everything and look they're very, they're totally made up sort of figures you know I don't know what your charge is now the rate. In Sydney it's bound to be more higher cost of living. It'll depend on how big an agency you are as well. Yeah, so sub your own figures in. Okay, and yeah, I like the idea of charging by the sprint. That sounds very consistent with that. Okay, so just as a bit of a summary then, I don't know what that slide's doing there as a summary I reckon this number one making you plan stand is a pretty good option and this is by far my favorite way to work because it's a green field thing everyone likes the project you can use your most recent methodology and you know what the project's about. The risk is very low for you and the client to be honest to be fair. Okay, number two I've cheated with the first two because I'm using the same line from the song because they're so similar. I was considering that. Would you believe but no. So this is similar. Entire project from conception that's the same using methodology that's the same with no pay discovery phase. So in other words they want an upfront quote. I should clarify here as well these first two I'm actually talking really about a process where the client sort of comes to you with some sort of brief or maybe an RFQ or request for quotation or maybe an RFP request for proposal. So they are that sort of things. I'm going to talk about tenders in a minute. Okay so without a pay discovery phase, what time do we start by the way? Do we start at quarter two? Holy moly. Better get going. Okay we have much less information or as we know errant information because we haven't had the opportunity to talk to the client about what the project is about. There's no guarantee of getting paid for the work so basically you need to factor that into your charges. You have to make a bunch of assumptions. Because you're making guesstimates you probably have to increase that 10% contingency figure which will increase the bottom line cost for the client and the client oh gee everyone's had this. You know if they come to you with a wimpy request for a website and everything and if they go to 10 agencies they'll get 12 answers about and how are they going to compare those proposals because they'll be for totally different systems because they haven't specified it. Okay so you'll have to decide whether you want to be part of that really and the risk is that you'll spend significant time and you won't get paid for that time. The self-fulfilling prophecy part is okay if I'm not going to get paid for the time I'm not going to put the time in therefore I won't win the bid. So it's a tricky thing. Some projects are probably worth it and my recommendation would simply to be follow your gut feel not your heart. Now the reason I say that very briefly is because there's a project just in the end of last year that I followed my heart. It was a great cause and everything it didn't quite stack up in the start but you know I was talking to the CEO I wasn't talking to the actual board which were the stakeholders but it was such a great cause I'll just you know put in for this and I'll show them I won't respond to what they ask for I'll tell them what they really need bad move. Anyway okay so an example of a costing without a discovery phase we'll move to the next sheet. There is it there. Okay the entire project it's very similar sort of spreadsheet to the last one we've still got a discovery phase but we've got to include a whole bunch of other things now so we'll include all our methodology and we've got to make some sort of guesses there. Notice how broad this is here when I work out well how much are we going to sort of spend on actually building the site. You've got to kind of have broad guesses here. But down the bottom you still come out with some titles. Okay so that's one way to actually do it. Feel free to look at that later. The verdict on the no paid discovery phase at the beginning is try to get paid for a discovery phase in my opinion it just makes it so much harder but you can't always. Okay number three let's see if we can get this little clip going. Beautiful hop on the bus Gus okay so hop on the bus Gus that means the whole project is in motion and you have to run alongside and jump in meaning that you're asked to develop a site based on designs existing designs or wireframes or prototype or maybe someone's actually commenced the build and you have to come in and help them or take over or something like that much of the planning is actually done you don't get a choice in that whole bunch of caveats come in here. Notice how with this costing thing I'm actually not talking that much about costing and figures I'm talking about situations really here that you have to watch out for on different approaches to them so watch for all of these things design, missing page designs, vector design files print designers do not understand vector and raster doesn't matter how you drum it into them so you just say right we want Photoshop files we want to negotiate on in design you designers and developers out there will understand that one or they'll give you wireframes we did an interesting project recently a design agency got a big government job in Queensland and they didn't have any capability to actually fulfill it so they got us to do it but they mocked up the wireframes in AXA I think that's how you pronounce it AXA anyone use that? AXA it's a pretty expensive tool but it's actually pretty jolly good and it gives you interactive wireframes that actually work you can do links in it and menus and all sorts of stuff but therein lied a bit of a caveat lay a bit of a caveat because with a working prototype like that that they control that's actually the specification how do you lock that down so what I did was actually got them to produce a PDF from it which did not have the interactivity and a few little we ended up with a few little gotchas functionality we didn't realise was there so and all this really goes to being able to define what you're agreeing to fairly carefully in terms of mess look there's all sorts of things that can happen on a project that started already and you have to make this assessment before you go into it I think things like they haven't scoped the project well enough so what is being built and what you're asked to build is actually not what the client wants and will make them happy so therefore it's going to be a lose situation you probably don't want to be involved in that or you try to be proactive and actually redirect the project get it back on track and that particularly happens if the goals of the project have not been defined the relationship with the client is often messy and of course the old beauty insufficient budget if they don't really have the money and they want you to bring you on board do you really want to be part of it if they don't have enough money to pay to do it properly ok so what do you do you have to decide you could do a detailed costing you could I suggest always lock down the scope that's probably the most important thing work out who's responsible for what particularly when there's multiple organisations involved and to find the conditions in a contract very important through this the most important thing that's in the contract has got to be really the specification if you don't have that careful enough you're just asking for trouble and you're taking on a significant liability and a risk in terms of you know if there's just a rough sort of wireframe or something of some functionality that can be interpreted different ways the client will interpret it to their advantage and potentially you would interpret it to your advantage but it's in everyone's interest to actually have it well defined move on have a look at some model contracts there's a few examples of some model contracts on the web there yeah Ryan I think I was looking at the contract that we actually use and it has a generic scope section sort of say this is a website development contract blah blah blah legal stuff and then in the schedule we actually define in more detail what it is and that usually refers to an external document which is like a specification document anyway and have a look at the resources there's some good contracts out there I suggest you use a contract very important contract conditions and that was my coverage of contracts Ryan because you put that comment on the page that's it no time for anything else so the verdict for method number three hop on the bus gas yeah can work okay but make sure the project is on a good footing would be my summary okay number four we're going to really speed up now okay this one here you don't need to be coy wrong you just listen to me okay just listen to me you will do it how I say you will do it tenders can be really prescriptive and often you don't get a choice really about how the thing works for example all the worst kind of prescriptive I'm sure everyone who's done tenders have actually seen this the dreaded standardized CMS requirement list Drupal actually handles these things fairly well and everything but man it takes you a long time to respond and they won't be written for Drupal Pam Barone is going to have a great session tomorrow called rethink your requirements and it's all about fashioning your requirements around Drupal and what it can do and often it's just a slight change of wording or a change in slight change of requirement that really doesn't mean anything to the client that will make some hard thing simple yeah and you all know that so yeah these requirements this particular one was 111 requirements and that's not as bad as they get they get significantly worse and I just think they're really sucky to be honest because it's a cop out for the client they simply don't have to think it's not related to their real requirements why do they want all this stuff because they think they might need it or something as you know PHP bring interpretive adding lots and lots of extra modules you want to make sure you put them in there for the right reasons because it's going to make your sites lower or more heavy anyway I know there are ways you can deal with that but gee isn't the best way actually having the problem in the first place and the suckiest reason I must say we want to we want to attend a few years ago and the client said to me after and it had one of these big long lists and I responded to it and the client said to me after oh he didn't really mean that we just got that from we just bought that list of requirements so that we could pre-qualify the vendors make sure that they knew what they're talking about yep so that's not valuing the vendors time okay so what is a tender it's a structured invitation to vendors usually it's very formal and well organized and well intentioned and everything but can really be off the mark and stuff but as I said before if you give them something other than they ask with they might welcome it with open arms they might also disqualify you completely so it's a bit of a lucky dip there as well as being prescriptive there can obviously be a significant investment involved tenders are usually quite large they only have one winner we again a couple of years ago applied for WorkCover Queensland a nice high profile sort of site and there was a second round so we got in the top three for the first round and then the next round was give us a demo system which is also kind of interesting and so we gave them what they said was the best demo they had and then they chose someone else which is kind of interesting base for a lot of reasons risk assessment as well look can be really important for tenders I'm not going to have time to go over this but if seriously look up ASNZS ISO 31000 sounds really hard it's the Australian standard which has been adopted as the international standard now and it's very clear but you just have to go through certain steps such as have a risk management framework, have a process and this is really probably the topic for another day I think but I've got a few notes in here that you can look at the most important thing is the risk register which is really define all the things that could go wrong, work out how important they are or how severe they're going to be and tell us how you're going to mitigate those risks and if you don't do that and one of your competitors does do that they will assume the worst of your ability to cope with those risks because you haven't addressed them and tenders are often difficult for small companies to be honest because they require so much work and everything and they sort of seem to be sort of set up for larger companies particularly when government departments feel better about employing larger organisations to do things, yes and no but that's what I've found certainly a couple of times from experience, these days Drupal is much bigger it's much more well accepted in larger organisations and again we're going to hear about that tomorrow and of course there are partnership opportunities with companies like Acquia and others how do you cost them? I think you have a detailed list again, you've really got a sort of cost work out what's going to be done in that list and everything and use a similar sort of spreadsheet to what we had before but it's going to be much bigger simply because there are so many more things involved. In clergy preparation time they're going to ask at least at least five, probably ten organisations are going to submit they get the benefit of all that ten, the nine that actually missed out who put in the work and everything so I reckon they can be charged a bit more. Tender organisations also tend to be bigger projects, they are less price sensitive but particularly these days in state government departments with governments being fairly strapped for cash they are after overall value for money so they really want good quality at a reasonable price, it doesn't have to be the lowest price though and there's lots of places that you can actually find tenders, there's a few examples there okay and that's my verdict on tenders then is they can be very worthwhile but think carefully before committing to the substantial work involved I would say. Okay, the ballpark estimate, we did start at quarter to four didn't we? Okay, is that right? Yep. Ballpark estimate is like gold because if you can actually give a quick ballpark estimate to a client instead of spending copious hours it saves everyone a lot of time potentially. So really my definition of the ballpark estimate is coming up with a number without putting in a heck of a lot of effort. All these situations is when they can be handy and there's lots and lots of situations there for when to use a ballpark estimate. Again it's sort of related to this idea of you know feel, you get a feel for the project, a feel for the client to work out sort of how much a project is going to cost and often you can actually give them a ballpark answer that you think it's going to be rightish and they'll say no that's too much and that's it. But you haven't spent a lot of time on it so great. Oh we didn't have the thingy did we? No one told me. Yeah, which is really cool. You don't need to discuss much on those because you don't need to go into a detailed discovery phase. Okay, how to make it a few ways. You can compare it to what you've done before. You can use your feel again. Add up some rough costs and look at number six. Okay, so I love the ballpark estimates because I reckon it just weeds things out. Okay this is probably the trickiest one, high level function point counting. My version of this function point counting has been around for a very long time and it's all to do with basically oh, thank you. Thank you very much. John? Just drop off the key, Lee. Okay, drop off the key, Lee. Now unfortunately here, I shouldn't admit to this, should I forget why I put this line on this one because I worked this out like last year so I'm open to suggestions. Maybe it's the key yeah it's probably because it's the key to doing a quote for a really big complex project and I'll just brush over this really quickly. So there's four steps really. You classify high level website functions. Okay, so they're things like we need a business directory, we need an events management system and we need some other stuff. Okay, you assign each of those terms in Drupal speak, vocabulary terms, a number so a small, sorry I'm actually not reading what I'm doing here. So you've got small, medium and large, you classify so your business directory might be a large, so you assign it a nine and your blog will be like an easy, a quick, a small so you'll assign that say a one. So I won't go to the spreadsheet but basically here is where we put this together. Maybe I will go to the spreadsheet because it's a bit complex. So that's the other thing is you can't be offline to look at these things, can you? Huh. Okay, I'll run through this really quickly. So we have a magnitude table, small, medium, large jobs and these are the high level functions, homepage, news, galleries, blogs, competitions. You classify them with a magnitude, how big is that approximately. From this table here we work out the number of units of work and we add them up at the bottom. So a total number of units of work is 49, so I'm going through this really quickly. So therefore that translates at what was it, 4, 3 or 4 hours per unit of work to 147 hours. You add on your project management cost and I forgot contingency, oh there it is, fantastic. And hey, presto at the bottom you get a number. Now this is kind of like your ballpark estimate for a humongous project where you don't want to just go what do I think that's going to be from a feel. It's really taking into account what's involved in the project and giving it some rough ideas. So have a look at the spreadsheet later on anyway. It's an interesting sort of technique. I use it every now and then when someone does want to quick, in other words when they don't want to take much time, they don't want to sort of pay for any discovery phase or anything, you can give them some sort of ballpark estimate. Any questions on that one? Sorry I'll ask you. I've showed this to the client. I like to be pretty open and honest about how I come up with things and if also they tend to, if you give them the bottom line, the 40 grand, they'll say oh what does that involve? What can I cut out? They don't have any information but then you're also giving them a haggling point. I think you'd have to compress a lot of things into a big heading really. Often they haven't actually thought that far about the specification I reckon for this one. No I don't try to hide it. I tell them what my contingency is. As long as they don't say when you're actually in the project and you use up some of the contingency they said oh there's a bit of contingency left. Can we use that for something else please? You make it clear right up front this contingency goes into our calculations what we're charging you is a fixed price bottom line that's what's in the contract. You've got to be clear one of my tips before was make sure they understand your contract. Moving right along because we have to have some questions and finish. We are back. 147. Yeah that's right. Thank you very much that's excellent. One of the things that I skipped there was this one here. I took the leap of saying if I go right to the top I'm actually saying a project is actually going to be 40% development and 60% something else because we've sort of worked out well you know we've got pretty good development capabilities and we sort of worked out right well the rest of the phases according to our methodology are really going to take about 60% of the project sort of all up and 40% so that's the extrapolation phase basically to the rest of the project. You might decide to actually base it on something else and extrapolate based on different figures but that's just an example. My place here Ryan can you repeat that question? I'm sorry. Yeah that's when it becomes probably a bit dicey and you'll have to make your own decisions about how you structure that and whether you show it to the client. Okay I lost my place there but so how they function accounting so the verdict on that one is really that that can be really handy for quick estimates. Okay the last couple of minutes before we go to sleep. No time for music. This is really I want music. Oh that's a really long one though. That's a good idea. Okay so thing over it. Low budget and high expectations be creative. Oh gee no one's ever heard that before. Low budget but high expectations. Every client really kind of falls into that category almost in some ways. I'd just say I've got a few ideas for how you do that but I'm sure you've got a lot. Okay an existing Drupal system. Sometimes clients actually come to us. Problem is all inside your head she said to me. It's easy if you take it logically. Okay so they have an existing Drupal system developed by someone else. They want you to take over development and all maintenance of the system. That's a heck of a lot I think and look the answer is really easy. Do an alley right on it because you don't really know where that system came from. I think. Why bad development on it? There are ways to actually analyse sites you know there's the aquia insight tool which we haven't used before but it sounds like it does that sort of thing and there's some other things. And maybe the problem was the actual client was bad client rather than their developer that's yeah and usually you can tell that by the feel when you talk to them. So I reckon start with a small task. Bill in advance blocks of hours. Easy. Okay something. Here we are. Here's a funny one. Quite high if you don't want the job or the client and you can't tell them directly. You know and there's lots of reasons why you can't tell them directly. Maybe they're difficult to deal with and you can never tell a client that really because they just won't see that. So quite high. You don't want the work. You don't agree with the project's morals. I just got to tell you I hadn't actually worked out if I got a call early on after starting Glow Digital from a brothel they wanted me to do a brothel website with explicit content and I said I'll get back to you but then I quickly worked out a policy to deal with that and since I've said that I have to deal with the policy was which was if I don't feel comfortable showing my kids I'm not going to take it on. I've used that a few times it's great. And maybe you don't want to tell them. Fantastic. And if the match doesn't feel right or if they smell maybe you don't want to tell them that. I don't know. And lastly this is my absolute favourite and it's great one to finish on. Okay tell them you don't want to work with them. Decline to be involved and for a number of reasons you know that you can tell them you haven't got enough money this isn't going to work in everything you disagree with their morals you know and you can tell them and the old famous history of bad debts. So there's a few summary points there but we're out of time I wanted to incorporate this in somewhere but I really couldn't find a spot for it so I thought I'd just thrown it in at the end. I thought that was excellent. Maybe okay maybe the moral is read the fine print in your contracts. Alright so we're done. Okay any questions. Sorry I haven't left any time for questions and stuff but I glad we had some time in between. Look I'll take one just maybe one anyone with a question otherwise we'll talk later. Great oh yes Ryan absolutely yeah the ballpark definitely and any other situation as well a range is good. Look thank you so much everyone really appreciate your attendance hope that was useful. Oh yes and you got a complete feedback as well apparently they want you to complete feedback there's a feedback form now on the website. Thank you.