Re: Pricing of technical writing

Subject: Re: Pricing of technical writing
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 06:15:05 -0500




Sarah Stegall wrote:



On Saturday, February 26, 2005, at 06:33 PM, Dick Margulis wrote:

I _never_ discount the hourly charge for out-of-scope/change order work, because I _really_ want to disincent sloppy planning on the customer's part. I want that "overtime" charge to frighten them into complying with the assumptions in the proposal.



Does this actually work? Do you know if your pricing approach has actually forced compliance from a project leader? I'd be glad to know of ANY approach that would compel a manager to stick to a schedule.



It hasn't worked in terms of sticking to a schedule, but it has worked in terms of limiting scope.

Example: A small software company had a user manual for their core product and wanted me to write a user manual for a second product. The first manual was clearly not produced by a tech writer (to put it as kindly as I can). Yet I was supposed to integrate the common parts into the new manual. The company estimated that the new material would encompass approximately 20 pages; and, after reviewing the software, I concurred. I pointed out that the new material would be written and designed to a different, more professional, standard and would be inconsistent with the old material. So what we ended up with was that I would ONLY format the old material that I was supposed to integrate, NOT rewrite it, and bill for the time required to do so. The resulting manual thus jumps back and forth between focused and accurate task-based user instructions and unfocused, randomly organized, confusing, feature-based instructions. But this was the limit of their budget; they could not afford to have me rewrite the core product manual at this time. We all understood the nature of the compromise and that we would revisit it later when they had more money to spend. I got paid for the work I did; I charged for the time spent on "reformatting" (and making minor corrections to avoid corrupting my Word doc) the old material. And everyone walked away happy. Am I proud of the finished product? No way. But did I do what the customer wanted and stay within budget? You betcha.

As for schedule, I just did a small project for my former employer. It was an RFP response; so there was a hard deadline. However, at each intermediate stage (getting input from various company departments, getting comments on drafts, etc.) they were always late. This is consistent with past behavior of people I know well; it was no surprise. Nonetheless, I was on call, basically for two days, waiting for input. I couldn't charge for this waiting time, because, in truth, if I'd had other active customer projects to work on, I'd have been free to work on them. So I frittered away non-billable time on low-priority chores, instead. Still, assuming they eventually pay me (a risk I took knowingly in this case), I'll come out okay on the project.

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Re: Pricing of technical writing: From: Sarah Stegall

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