Questions - Going from Hourly to Per Project Basis? (take II)

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

In my previous message, I wrote "if you know that you've billed for 10 hours
per week playing Nintendo outside a manager's office... tell them right away
that such delays are costing them 10 hours per week of billable time.>>

Mike O. quite properly noted that: <<The problem is that I am not
comfortable goofing off for 10 billable hours. I'd probably go home and do
something else, and lose 10 hours billing for that week.>>

Agreed. I have a lamentable tendency to be facetious in answering, and while
that makes the answers more entertaining, it also makes them less effective.
In this case, I used the Nintendo as a silly example of a more serious
problem: most of us waste a lot of time waiting for someone else, through no
fault of our own, and we shouldn't be expected to go without compensation
for that wasted time.

<<I have solved this problem in the past by billing in units of "elapsed
week" rather than hours. This shifts the financial burden of "waiting for
them to talk to me" back to the client where it rightly belongs. With weekly
billing, if I have to wait ten hours for info, I can just go home, do
something else, and I still get paid for the whole week. This only has to
happen a few times before the client gets the idea that they need to keep
the project moving.>>

That's an excellent suggestion. I'll keep it in mind for future reference.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

"Wisdom is one of the few things that look bigger the further away it
is."--Terry Pratchett

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