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Hi Rosy, Thanks for your reply. I would greatly appreciate seeing your spreadsheets. We do an honorable amount of project estimation and time-tracking here, too. We always draft a "Memorandum of Understanding" -- an agreement for what work the library will provide on the project and a timetable for completing said work -- with our digital collection project clients. We try hard to stay focused on the deliverables in that document, but there's always some feature creep in development work. We do not have plans to "charge back" for development services, but wondered if other schools worked in such a way. The recent success of our new library catalog launch and future digital collection platform (Hi Blacklight folk) has momentarily increased interest in our born- digital digital collection efforts. There's also a campus-wide effort here at UW-Madison to raise awareness for "Educational Innovation" opportunities that might generate new revenue streams for the university. We're not used to charging for our services in the library, but some hypothetical partnerships could present the opportunity. I'm sure other public institutions are doing similar what-if revenue exercises: http://edinnovation.wisc.edu/ Thanks again and I'll ping you off list to chat more. Cheers, - Eric On Jun 6, 2012, at 11:28 AM, Rosalyn Metz wrote: > Hey Eric, > > At GW we've been doing some cost estimates for projects. > Essentially we > pull together the team, figure out the different tasks that need to be > accomplished, determine who will be working on those tasks, estimate > hours > necessary to do the work, and then use salaries to calculate the cost. > > Right now we're primarily doing this for digitization projects, but > I've > had experience doing this at other jobs (not in libraries) with dev > projects. There are a couple of caveats to this though: > > - *estimating time takes practice to perfect*. a lot of the time > people > aren't really sure how long something is going to take until they've > started thinking about how long things actually take. and really, > you'll > only know how long things take if you keep track of your time. > that can > open up a can of worms, but in this case i like to frame it as > you're just > doing it to ensure that a project isn't more work than you expected. > - *ensure that you're organized up front*. as anyone can tell you, > scope creep kills a project. before you begin estimates you'll > want to > make sure that you know what the scope of the project is. its > important to > sit down with the group you're charging and really discuss the > project. we > use tito's project one pagers to outline what it is that we're > doing and > what it is that we're not doing. sitting down and talking to the > stakeholders helps us really understand what they want, and > provides us > with the opportunity to say no if something is impossible, takes > too long > given the deadline, or whatever. > > If you want, I have some spreadsheets that I use to create > estimates. I'm > happy to send them your way. And if you want I can skype with you or > something and talk you through what they each do (because I don't > think its > readily apparent). > > Let me know, > Rosy > --------------------------------------------------- > Digital Project Manager > Gelman Library > The George Washington University > f: 202.994.7439 > > > > > > > > On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Eric Larson > <[log in to unmask]>wrote: > >> Any academic libraries out there doing consulting or application >> development work for hire on their campuses? -- not freebie work, >> but where >> actual money exchanges across campus accounting lines. >> >> I would be curious to hear how you go about pricing out your >> services, or >> if you have a selection process for the work you choose to perform. >> >> Cheers, >> - Eric >> >> -- >> Eric Larson >> >> Web Application Developer >> Shared Development Group >> University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries >> [log in to unmask] >> -- Eric Larson Digital Library Consultant UW Digital Collections Center [log in to unmask] Connect with us on… •The Web: http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu •Facebook: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/uwdc-fb •Twitter: http://twitter.com/UWdigiCollec •RSS: http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/News/NewsFeed/UWDCNews.xml