Evaluation of labor costs for the project and the preparation of commercial proposals
It is not a secret for anyone that most development teams regularly or periodically meet with situations of failed deadlines and exceeding the planned budget of projects. In the English-language Internet you can find a lot of information about this. Moreover, each more or less experienced developer, as a rule, has his own opinion on this matter.
The task of properly estimating the project effort and the timing of its implementation is vital for any development team. And most importantly, everyone understands this very well! So what's the deal? Why are projects regularly being made longer and significantly more expensive than planned?
As a rule, the following reasons are most often called:
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Thus, in order to deliver the project on time and to the approved budget, it is required to carefully and in detail clarify the requirements with the customer and approve them. The standard and, in my opinion, the correct order of preparatory work is reduced to writing those tasks, preparing and approving mocaps with the customer and, ultimately, to creating an interface prototype. After these few points have been completed, a qualified analyst simply needs to correctly estimate the project's labor costs and plan the deadlines.
But in practice this happens very rarely. Why?
To solve this problem, companies often make a preliminary assessment and only if they see a serious interest of the client, begin a deep and systematic analysis. And it often happens that the sales manager does not have the opportunity to change the budget several times with the client and the sale is carried out at the price announced in the course of the surface evaluation of the project. And then the company at its own risk assumes the responsibility of carrying out such a project.
I think that I did not reveal something new for those who do it every day. The problem remains unresolved for many teams.
In order to solve this problem, it is obviously necessary to build a system process of working with new requests for projects and, accordingly, with clients. Obviously, the sales manager and technical analyst must have the necessary knowledge and experience to work with clients and evaluate projects. But by systematization, I mean the formalization of a process with its division into specific stages and purposes for each stage.
What did we come up with to improve the situation?
Back in 2011, we realized that a large proportion of errors occur during the initial assessment of a project. It was also clear that the use of excel plates for estimating labor costs and embedding them into a word in a commercial offer template takes time, and also gives rise to minor errors that employees often miss. And it also became clear that employees do not even always know what is required to be done, to write, to think out when forming the project assessment and creating a commercial proposal.
We decided to write an internal application for project evaluation and preparation of a commercial offer immediately. It was decided to force the technical analyst to go through specific pages and fill in the required fields. And the evaluation of the project itself should be put on a separate page in the form of a plate similar to excel (the ability to use almost the same hot keys and enter data from the keyboard). At the same time, the technical analyst had to divide any project at the implementation stage, modules (large parts of the requirements), as well as tasks and subtasks down to the smallest ones. Thus, any assessment was carried out with the filling of specific fields and, most importantly, the entire amount of work was systematically divided into a huge number of small tasks divided into modules and stages. As a result, the accuracy of the assessment increased, and already at the stage of the initial preparation of the proposal, a lot of very specific and minor questions arose, the answers to which allowed us to give an even more accurate assessment. The sales manager had to fill in only a few pages and determine the budget (based on the cost per hour or give a total price), payment terms and add various marketing data.
Next, we delimited the responsibilities of the sales manager and technical analyst. Some pages could only be filled by a technical analyst, and part of the pages only by the employee responsible for sales and the formation of the cost of the project. Thus, the technical analyst saw only the technical part, and the sales manager could not change anything in the technical part of the proposal.
Over time, having encountered frequent similar projects, we introduced templates (the ability to make an assessment / proposal based on the proposal created earlier), as well as a CRM module for storing customer information and tracking the negotiation process.
Thus, we have achieved a dramatic improvement in the accuracy of project evaluations. And all the work, starting with the initial receipt of the requirement and ending with the start of work on the project, has become much more systematic. Serious errors in project evaluation were excluded.
Later we met similar products and switched to one of them for daily work. On the market now there are several similar applications that can greatly facilitate the process of analyzing and evaluating projects. They can be found by such requests as "Software project proposal creation". But it is important to emphasize that the choice of a software is not an absolute solution in itself. It is much more important to build the work of the team involved in the analysis and evaluation of projects on clearly defined steps with a specific intermediate and final result, and also to delineate the responsibility of employees of different qualifications (salespeople and technical specialists), demanding from each the results characteristic of his responsibility.
Correct assessment of the project is the key to successful completion.
The task of properly estimating the project effort and the timing of its implementation is vital for any development team. And most importantly, everyone understands this very well! So what's the deal? Why are projects regularly being made longer and significantly more expensive than planned?
As a rule, the following reasons are most often called:
')
- Because there are new requirements from the customer;
- Because the assessment did not take into account part of the requirements from the customer;
- Because they encountered unforeseen technical difficulties.
Thus, in order to deliver the project on time and to the approved budget, it is required to carefully and in detail clarify the requirements with the customer and approve them. The standard and, in my opinion, the correct order of preparatory work is reduced to writing those tasks, preparing and approving mocaps with the customer and, ultimately, to creating an interface prototype. After these few points have been completed, a qualified analyst simply needs to correctly estimate the project's labor costs and plan the deadlines.
But in practice this happens very rarely. Why?
- Because the customer wants to get the price before the requirements are agreed in detail
- Because doing the mentioned work for each new request for free is very expensive
- Very often, it is morally difficult for technical analysts to study every day new requests for projects and make a thorough analysis and correspondingly correct assessment.
- And the main problem: very often the person evaluating the project does not know exactly how to systematically approach his assessment. And the sales manager often does not know how to make a commercial offer on the basis of the assessment. And often enough, especially in small firms, it is done by the same person, either with a technical or economic education. What is also a plus to the correct assessment of labor costs and the budget does not add.
To solve this problem, companies often make a preliminary assessment and only if they see a serious interest of the client, begin a deep and systematic analysis. And it often happens that the sales manager does not have the opportunity to change the budget several times with the client and the sale is carried out at the price announced in the course of the surface evaluation of the project. And then the company at its own risk assumes the responsibility of carrying out such a project.
I think that I did not reveal something new for those who do it every day. The problem remains unresolved for many teams.
In order to solve this problem, it is obviously necessary to build a system process of working with new requests for projects and, accordingly, with clients. Obviously, the sales manager and technical analyst must have the necessary knowledge and experience to work with clients and evaluate projects. But by systematization, I mean the formalization of a process with its division into specific stages and purposes for each stage.
What did we come up with to improve the situation?
Back in 2011, we realized that a large proportion of errors occur during the initial assessment of a project. It was also clear that the use of excel plates for estimating labor costs and embedding them into a word in a commercial offer template takes time, and also gives rise to minor errors that employees often miss. And it also became clear that employees do not even always know what is required to be done, to write, to think out when forming the project assessment and creating a commercial proposal.
We decided to write an internal application for project evaluation and preparation of a commercial offer immediately. It was decided to force the technical analyst to go through specific pages and fill in the required fields. And the evaluation of the project itself should be put on a separate page in the form of a plate similar to excel (the ability to use almost the same hot keys and enter data from the keyboard). At the same time, the technical analyst had to divide any project at the implementation stage, modules (large parts of the requirements), as well as tasks and subtasks down to the smallest ones. Thus, any assessment was carried out with the filling of specific fields and, most importantly, the entire amount of work was systematically divided into a huge number of small tasks divided into modules and stages. As a result, the accuracy of the assessment increased, and already at the stage of the initial preparation of the proposal, a lot of very specific and minor questions arose, the answers to which allowed us to give an even more accurate assessment. The sales manager had to fill in only a few pages and determine the budget (based on the cost per hour or give a total price), payment terms and add various marketing data.
Next, we delimited the responsibilities of the sales manager and technical analyst. Some pages could only be filled by a technical analyst, and part of the pages only by the employee responsible for sales and the formation of the cost of the project. Thus, the technical analyst saw only the technical part, and the sales manager could not change anything in the technical part of the proposal.
Over time, having encountered frequent similar projects, we introduced templates (the ability to make an assessment / proposal based on the proposal created earlier), as well as a CRM module for storing customer information and tracking the negotiation process.
Thus, we have achieved a dramatic improvement in the accuracy of project evaluations. And all the work, starting with the initial receipt of the requirement and ending with the start of work on the project, has become much more systematic. Serious errors in project evaluation were excluded.
Later we met similar products and switched to one of them for daily work. On the market now there are several similar applications that can greatly facilitate the process of analyzing and evaluating projects. They can be found by such requests as "Software project proposal creation". But it is important to emphasize that the choice of a software is not an absolute solution in itself. It is much more important to build the work of the team involved in the analysis and evaluation of projects on clearly defined steps with a specific intermediate and final result, and also to delineate the responsibility of employees of different qualifications (salespeople and technical specialists), demanding from each the results characteristic of his responsibility.
Correct assessment of the project is the key to successful completion.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/248677/
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