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Re: Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
Valdis Krebs <valdis@...>
Larry,
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Yeah, I agree with the others -- $75 is peanuts for that work, unless you would be learning on the job. Will they pay by the hour, or do they want a flat rate for the "3 month effort"? And what if the project is delayed -- by no fault of your own -- and it runs 6 months? [happens A LOT!] OK, you have 10 years experience in KM, but how much experience in what they specifically ask for? And you have never been independent before -- will be learning on the job [maybe not content, but work style, etc]. Have you ever done an information flow analysis? How often have you played the liaison role? [I hope they are not hiring you to bridge silos they could not]. BTW, when I see this: "high level of experience dealing with corporate politics" it is usually code words for "we do not get along, this is a very rough environment" -- so you may want to consider ratcheting up your rate for "hazardous duty pay" ;-) If you are fully experienced in what they specifically seek, I would start @ $150/hour, and adjust based on the above. A big consulting firm would probably charge $300/hour and put in a recent college grad with less than 5 years experience. Good Luck, Valdis On Jan 16, 2009, at 1:02 PM, Larry Hawes wrote:
Valdis, |
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Re: Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
Peter Marshall <peter.marshall@...>
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Re: Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
Larry Hawes
Valdis,
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Thanks for your quick interaction! The client states that it is a 3-month contract. Project description as follows: International law firm is seeking a Knowledge Management Subject Matter Expert (SME) who will be able to assess the current information flow, create a roadmap for better information sharing, and execute on this plan. The SME will bring with them the best practices, tool and strategy recommendations associated with Knowledge Management. The ideal candidate will be able to comfortably act as liaison to business users and IS. The candidate will have a high level of experience dealing with corporate politics and a track record of finding common ground to successfully roll out knowledge management projects with similar clients. Hope this helps you recommend an hourly rate to me. btrw, I have 10 years experience as a KM consultant, but none of it as an independent. Thanks and best regards, Larry --- In sikmleaders@..., Valdis Krebs <valdis@...> wrote:
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Re: Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
DeGard, Paulette H <Paulette.H.Degard@...>
Out on the west coast $75 an hour would be low. My rule of thumb is double what you would like to take home so if you want to make $75 an hour charge $150 because the other $75 goes towards taxes, overhead expenses, technology, etc that one must pay for when doing contracting work. Although I work for Boeing now, I have been a contractor/consultant for most of my 25+ year career.
BTW, the question about length is also a variable – the longer the contract the lower the hourly rate, usually. However, never undersell yourself and you can always renegotiate your fees if the contract gets extended.
Good luck with your contract.
Paulette
Dr. Paulette DeGard Knowledge Strategist Lead, Process and Efficiency Team Flight Deck 425-717-9238 (voice) 360-550-4099 (telecommute number on Fridays) From: Peter Dorfman
[mailto:pdorfman@...]
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 9:40 AM To: sikmleaders@... Subject: Re: [sikmleaders] Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
Larry: |
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Re: Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
Valdis Krebs <valdis@...>
Depends on the work Larry... what exactly would you be doing for them? and for how long?
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Valdis On Jan 16, 2009, at 11:55 AM, Larry Hawes wrote:
I am in need of quick validation of an hourly billing rate figure and |
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Re: Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
Carl Frappaolo <cfraff@...>
Larry:
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Seems too low to be honest. At least 100 On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Larry Hawes <lehawes@...> wrote:
-- Carl Frappaolo Co-founder and Principal Information Architected, Inc. Ten Post Office Square Boston, MA 02109 617-933-2584 cf@... blog: www.takingaiim.com |
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Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
Larry Hawes
I am in need of quick validation of an hourly billing rate figure and
would appreciate your input. It's been a while since I've done any independent consulting. The specific opportunity is to perform a consulting project/contract work for a large international law firm based in Boston. I'm thinking $75/hour would be acceptable to the client and me. Does that seem reasonable to you? If not, is it too high or low and what figure do you suggest. Thanks again for any input you can offer! Larry Hawes |
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Re: Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
Peter Dorfman <pdorfman@...>
Larry:
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I'm with Carl on the fee. Too low, especially for Boston. Peter Dorfman On Fri Jan 16 12:04 , Carl Frappaolo <cfraff@...> sent:
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Re: Consultant/Contractor Hourly Billing Rates
#consulting
katepugh@...
Larry
-
Here
is a hourly rate calculator:
Go
under resources, "Price your services." The pdf example reflects outdated costs,
but you can update it. Kate
Katrina
Pugh katepugh@... 617 967 3910 (m) 781 538 5262 (l) In a message dated 1/16/2009 12:04:27 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
cfraff@... writes:
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Content Strategy
#strategy
#content-management
mzaharee <mzaharee@...>
Our Knowledge Services group is developing a content strategy,
primarily for unstructured content, that will guide our initiatives and work program over the next few years. We would be interested in hearing from other organizations about their efforts in this area. We would like our subject matter experts (SME) to collaborate and share with their peers. If you are interested, please have your SME contact Betsy Cogliano (bfc@..., 781-271-7834). No need to reply all, Betsy will make sure contact information among the responders is shared. Some background info to clarify the issue is included below. Thanks in advance, Marcie Zaharee __________________ We have identified many facets of content that we think need to be addressed in the strategy: • Content creation and capture • Findability • Standards • Quality/value • Sensitivity/access control • Information lifecycle • Tools for tagging, managing, storing, etc. • Types – Web content, Sharepoint lists, document libraries, Wikis, Blogs, Listservs, etc. And we have identified some areas that we think need to be addressed first: • Understanding the capabilities of our new Content Management System (Oracle) • Where content is captured, stored • A Corporate metadata strategy • Using value to guide the strategy and the stewardship • Findability – if it exists, can we find it? We would be interested in hearing from others about their efforts in this area. Do they have a content strategy? If so, seeing examples would be great. If not, have they thought about these issues ? Have they addressed them in some other way? |
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Value of Facebook friend about 37 cents: NYTimes Blog
#social-media
Tom Short <tman9999@...>
In this article in the NYTimes , Jenna Wortham discusses a Burger King promotion offering Facbook users a free Whopper (value: about $3.70) if they delete 1o of their friends. Interesting read in terms of the reactions of users who were interviewed, and the reasons they gave as to why it would be difficult to weed out 10 people from their lists of up to 600 (or more) "friends." I particularly liked the answer given by a gentleman who said he thought it would be easy, but ended up getting stuck at seven because he grew concerned about what information he might miss if he deleted people, even though he was no longer in constant communication with them.
Not being a Facebook user (I know - webcretin) this to me is an interesting insight into the motivation for some people to use these types of sites - in addition to being a popularity contest (who can accumulate the most friends), also appears to be a way to build one's own custom set of narrowcasting info channels, based on the vetted relationships one has developed. Makes sense - even if it's three relationships beyond some person you were once dating, it doesn't mean that person's perspective and info flows may not still be of some interest, in some particular areas. |
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Re: Value of Facebook friend about 37 cents: NYTimes Blog
#social-media
Peter Dorfman <pdorfman@...>
I first got on Facebook about a year ago, and at that time I went looking for
groups in a couple of my key interest areas (knowledge management and IT service management/ITIL). From those groups, I friended a number of people I didn't know, but who simply shared these interests. Also, I've accepted friend requests from an additional number of strangers, sometimes pretty indiscriminately. I know I would not have any problem deleting 10 of these people. Does that say something about me and my networking proclivities? Then again...I wouldn't touch a Whopper with a 10-foot pole. Peter Dorfman KnowledgeFarm http://pdorfman.wordpress.com On Mon Jan 12 11:05 , 'Tom Short' <tman9999@...> sent: offering Facbook users a free Whopper (value: about $3.70) if they delete 1o of their friends. Interesting read in terms of the reactions of users who were interviewed, and the reasons they gave as to why it would be difficult to weed out 10 people from their lists of up to 600 (or more) "friends." I particularly liked the answer given by a gentleman who said he thought it would be easy, but ended up getting stuck at seven because he grew concerned about what information he might miss if he deleted people, even though he was no longer in constant communication with them. insight into the motivation for some people to use these types of sites - in addition to being a popularity contest (who can accumulate the most friends), also appears to be a way to build one's own custom set of narrowcasting info channels, based on the vetted relationships one has developed. Makes sense - even if it's three relationships beyond some person you were once dating, it doesn't mean that person's perspective and info flows may not still be of some interest, in some particular areas. |
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Re: Adoption Rate
#metrics
Murray Jennex
My colleagues and I have been researching KM success for several years with
the express purpose of identifying:
a success model
a set of critical success factors
a definition of KM success
a set of KM success measures
a set of KM success KPIs
I will be happy to share our findings with the group in a few weeks but
will first ask for a short confirmation survey (we are finalizing our results
and I would like to see what this group thinks of them so want your opinion
before sharing all the docs - this is so we don't bias you, not because we are
trying to entice you)
I did want to make one comment on use measures: I don't think they
mean much as long as you can show that your KM/KMS is getting some use.
What I have found to be a much better predictor of KM success is the intent to
use of our knowledge workers. What intent to use means is that the
knowledge worker intends to go to the system when they have a question.
Why this is a good predictor is due to the use of the Perceived Benefit Model
based off of the Theory of Unplanned Action (and what this all really means is
that the organization and the knowledge worker see value in the system so intend
to use when its needed). I've published these results in the article
citation below (I can send you a file if you can't find it if you let me know):
Jennex, M.E., (2008). “Exploring System Use as a Measure of Knowledge Management Success,” Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, 20(1), pp. 50-63. The bottom line is amount of actual use doesn't mean much, the quality of
use and using it when appropriate are much better indicators of success and
Perceived Benefit is a way of measuring if a user will use the system when
appropriate.
Thanks...murray jennex
Murray E. Jennex, Ph.D., P.E., CISSP
San Diego State University
Editor in Chief International Journal of Knowledge Management
Co-editor in Chief International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis
Response and Management
In a message dated 1/8/2009 10:52:56 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
john.mcquary@... writes:
At Fluor, we measure our knowledge communities as being successful if |
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Expertise Survey - We'd like your input
#expertise
#survey
#research
Matt Moore <laalgadger@...>
Hello,
Patrick Lambe & myself are engaging in some research on expertise. How the expertise of staff gets nurtured, shared and used by organisations (or not). We think it's an important topic and some of the discussions on this list indicate that you do too. Part of this research involves collecting stories & experiences. We have a nifty form here for the contributing of stories: http://usingexpertise.com/2008/12/contribute-story.html You can see stories from others on our blog: http://usingexpertise.com/ (where you can also make comments on the stories of others) Once we have a sufficient number of stories, we'll be conducting sensemaking workshops with them. Let me stress that all stories will be anonymised. You could contribute them under a false name and email if you really wanted to but then you may not here about future project developments so I would not recommend that. More on our plans here: http://usingexpertise.com/2008/12/about.html WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU: - We'd love you to contribute your stories on the topic of expertise. They can be as detailed or as high-level as you like. - Please read some of the other stories and add comments if you want. - Please pass this on to colleagues inside your organisation who may have stories of your own to tell. - If you have a blog or a newsletter then please tell people about this if you think it will be relevant to them. Looking forward to hearing from you. Regards, Matt Moore |
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Joe Raimondo
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Re: Adoption Rate
#metrics
jacobwatts <jacob.watts@...>
Thank you for your response Andrew. Your stat for a community
implementation makes more sense. Now that I'm thinking about it, we do have a grassroots CoP with about a 20% membership rate and probably half of them are regularly active in the community. For our implementation, I believe we should be at a 95%+ adoption rate on a monthly basis, as we operate in an extremely complex environment. In addition to the volume of processes we have internally and with other internal organizations, we offer a wide variety of products that are on various platforms, making it impossible for anyone to know everything WebEx, regardless of tenure. I can't imagine that any individual could go an entire month without having at least one opportunity to use the system. Realistically we could probably say our organization should be at a 95% adoption rate on a ~weekly basis, but changing the everyday workflow and habits of a largely tenured organization doesn't come easy, so at the moment a monthly measurement seems to make sense. Our last 9 months we've averaged over 70% adoption, which I consider 'not bad' under the circumstances, but would like to see improved upon. From a management perspective I've asked managers not to focus on enforcing usage through metrics to avoid turning the system into a button-mashing contest, so I feel the adoption we are seeing is genuine. I am definitely interested in hearing other experiences on the subject, and would like to see what kind of consensus the group comes to. |
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Re: Adoption Rate
#metrics
john_mcquary <john.mcquary@...>
At Fluor, we measure our knowledge communities as being successful if
they are delivering results on their objectives, however we do maintain numerous statistics including unique users per month. In any typical month, about 55% of our 28,000+ members will go into the system at least once. Over any three month period we see just over 70% unique logins. As of Jan 8 2009 10:39AM PST, there have been 26.2% unique users this month. - John |
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Re: Adoption Rate
#metrics
Andrew Gent <ajgent@...>
Hi Jacob, Great question. Unfortunately, I think the answer is the inevitable "it depends". What does it depend on? It depends on what your target audience is and what their expected usage pattern would be. While I was at HP, our monthly usage (i.e. unique users) for SharePoint reached 100K (that was 2/3 of the total company population) before we stopped counting. Our original target had been 50% of our specific organization a month. On the other hand, our target for a catalog of past projects was around 1 or 2 thousand users a month. Why the difference? We expect SharePoint users (for self-serve collaboration spaces) to use the space at least once a week -- in many cases it is actually more than once a day. We also expected up to 80% of the organization to participate in projects. The project catalog, on the other hand, is usually used only when people are starting projects and looking for previous examples or when they get stuck and are looking for assistance from people with similar experience. Some fuzzy logic about how many new projects started a year and who was most likely to need the information (project managers, architects, and project leads), we came up with a target of 10-15% of the organization per month. So in your case, it would depend on who and how often you expect people to need the documentation. --Andrew Gent P.S. My example of 20% was from a few collaboration technology implementations I knew of. From: jacobwatts To: sikmleaders@... Sent: Thursday, January 8, 2009 1:09:25 PM Subject: [sikmleaders] Adoption Rate Hello, everyone. As a silent member for a few months now I thought |
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Adoption Rate
#metrics
jacobwatts <jacob.watts@...>
Hello, everyone. As a silent member for a few months now I thought
I'd briefly introduce myself (and thereby my situation) before posing my first question to the community. I am a senior program manager for Cisco WebEx (formerly WebEx Communications) within the account management (service) organization. Internally I am referred to as the Knowledge Base Manager, and I am responsible for the success of our organization's implementation of a knowledge base. The implementation began just over 2 years ago, and went live around mid-2007. The KB is used for process documentation as well as typical product-related content (usability questions and problem resolution). One of the measurements I look at to evaluate usage (and consider a barometer of success) is total unique users per month. If people don't find what they're looking for, they don't come back. If they continue to return, I feel we can safely conclude that it ~is~ working for them more often than not, so a positive trend in this area indicates a successful implementation. (When I say successful implementation, I mean "we're on the right track," not "we're done.") Here's where my question comes from: through reading the threads in this forum I ran into Andrew Gent's blog, where he states "Frequently, an adoption rate as low as 20% is considered success for a KM initiative." (http://incrediblydull.blogspot.com/2008/09/alternatives-to- collaboration.html) Not to dispute that this is his experience, but this does seem extremely low to me – although it does sound like he is referring more towards community-based collaboration efforts than a systemic implementation like mine. Regardless, it did raise again the questions in my mind which I thought would be best answered by this group: With a KM systems implementation (whether KB or other CMS), what adoption rate do you consider a success? What adoption rates have you seen in your experience? The assumption here is that we agree on how I'm measuring the adoption rate, which could be a conversation all on its own. Thanks in advance for any insight you have on this subject. -Jacob Watts |
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Larry Hawes
Valdis et al,
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I think you are on the right track when putting Probablity forward as a believable metric for measuring the value of social capital. A research-intensive firm (e.g. Xerox, 3M, Sony) should, at least ideally, have a documented history of past experimentation. This history would allow them to discover ratios of project success to failure for various initiatives with different partners (thinking links, not nodes.) That ratio would communicate probability of success when different partners collaborate to innovate. To carry this notion a step further, we could actually derive a hard currency value by determining the profit accrued from each past successful innovation effort, calculating average profit, and correlating that figure to the probability of project success. I suppose the equation might be: Average profit per successful innovation attempt X Probability of success of innovation attempt = Potential value of Social Capital focused on innovation Feel free to rip this apart. I'm not a math whiz, but I suspect that this is over simplified. I hope the concept makes sense at minimum, but I may be off there too, so please bend this any way that seems to make sense to you. Thanks all, Larry Hawes --- In sikmleaders@..., Valdis Krebs <valdis@...> wrote:
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