Determining the right rate for your services is difficult and sometimes an arbitrary process. A survey of the rates negotiated by IT service providers for the State of Colorado shows a very wide range of rates with the highest rates sometimes three times larger than the lowest rate listed.

With the current expansion — after almost 5 years of contraction — of IT services, experienced consultants and service providers should expect to be able to negotiate within the higher end of the band. However, this will be limited by their ability to offer newer technologies or solid experience in particular methodologies or industries. More than ever, it is becoming important to specialize, as most recruiters won’t consider candidates that don’t have experience in particular industries or with particular sets of tools.

Average hourly rate using data from 39 IT services companies serving the State of Colorado in 2005-2006.

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What If Project LLC offers leadership and project management coaching and consulting for small and medium-sized technology companies. To learn more about how to market your consulting services or receive a complete copy of the survey contact us via What If Project.

In collaboration with Critical Pathfinders, What If Project leads a teambuilding and brainstorming event for Microsoft’s UX hardware group.

Approximately 20 team members from the main Microsoft headquarters convened in downtown Seattle on January 19 to stimulate new innovative thinking and bond with their team members. Using a combination of a scavenger hunt and a brainstorming exercise, participants were asked to come up with a unique and innovative piece of technology for 19 to 25-year-olds who are obsessed with buying environmentally friendly products.

To learn more about our coaching and teambuilding services, please visit What If Project

Seemingly erratic behavior by customers or managers cannot be understood without considering their beliefs and circumstances.

I had worked in technology consulting for less than a year when I started to realize that all of our clients were “crazy.” At least that’s what most of my co-workers thought, and I was starting to agree with them.

For a while, I wondered if it was us. Was there something special that our company offered that seemed to attract the biggest loons? So, I changed jobs to work with different clients and different co-workers. But those clients were crazy, too. (Even crazier, actually.)

By that time, I had a large enough sample size that I needed to start re-thinking my hypothesis. It wasn’t statistically possible that everyone in our organization was sane while everyone in their organization was nuts. This re-considering also happend to coincide with moving to a more senior position within my new company.

In spite of what my former peers might have thought, I hadn’t joined the dark side or become a bubblehead after sticking an upper management title on my business card. I had simply acquired more context, because I had more access to the beliefs and constraints that were driving the clients’ decisions. And although I was able to confirm that a few of them were really, truly nuts, most of them weren’t.

Instead of wondering why we were suddenly trashing a component of a product that seemed to be central to its appeal in the middle of the project (leading me to conclude once again, that the client was crazy), I saw it as a rational decision made under budget or competitor duress. I also started to get the sense that the client might think we were crazy, too. Maybe we were.

I have since come to the conclusion that most people are almost always acting rationally IF (and that’s a really big “if”), you take into consideration both their circumstances and their beliefs. And that is where the rub is. Most people don’t go around spouting what their beliefs are. In fact, some people aren’t always aware of what their beliefs are. Further complicating the issue is that most of us also assume that our beliefs are the same as others.

Let’s say, for example, that I’m a manager and I believe that technology is the same as magic. So, as your boss, I would like you to invent a perpetual motion machine. You, the proud owner of an undergraduate degree in physics, explain to me that it will not be possible. Because, according to important laws of the universe, eventually our machine would come to a grinding halt.

“But why?” I ask.

“Because of laws that have to do with friction and thermodynamics,” you say.

“I think those are just excuses,” I say.

This could go on forever, until, ideally one day you uncover the fact that I believe in magic, and I actually believe that you are really a magician, even though your job title says technical developer. Making this discovery is unlikely to make you change my belief, but at least now you have a better understanding of my point-of-view. This is crucial to your communication with me (and my communication with you, incidentally).

So, next time, you think someone is just crazy, poke around and try to find out why they might be acting that way. Consider who they are and what circumstances they’re in. If you can get outside your own crazy ideas, they might just seem a little more sane after all.
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What If Project LLC offers leadership and project management coaching and consulting for small and medium-sized technology companies. To learn more about how we can help you communicate with the crazy people, visit What If Project or contact us for a free consultation.

Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles

This is a good book with a few fatal flaws. First, the author — obviously a very intelligent and passionate person — makes a critical reasoning error by mistaking correlation for causation. Just because two things happen together, doesn’t mean that one of them caused the other.

The particular example that made my skin to crawl was the idea that the economic boom during the last 50 years has caused the degradation and the dismantaling of the nuclear family. In particular, Stiles says that this is because women entered the workforce en masse driven by feminist ideology and market forces (the need for cheap labor). This put stress on traditional family roles and organization and has led to much higher rates of divorce.

Politics aside, there are other plausible explanations for this phenomenon. For example, women who might have divorced prior to 1950 simply could not afford to because they knew they would have no money and no way to get a good-paying job. Therefore, they stayed married in spite of what it might have done to their emotional, spiritual or even physical health.

The second problem with this book is related to the first. Because the author is prone to sweeping generalizations about market causes and social effects, right-wing (and some left-wing) political rhetoric bubbles easily to the surface. This degrades the quality of many of his arguments and observations.

However, if you can tolerate this part of his writing, there are some interesting ideas to be mined from this work. Specifically the idea that The Market — the economic engine that drives our country in tandem with all its behaviors and point-of-view — needs to be moderated by human values and social and environmental justice.

We cannot, as a country and as a people, build tract housing, warm the atmosphere, turn a blind eye to white-collar crime and gobble up pornographic and violent media without ultimately degrading our quality of life. The main, and important point, made is that the free market is amoral. If we use free market principles to define who we are and what we value, then we will be left lonely, empty-handed and surrounded by the trash that is now our planet.

Don’t use lame excuses as a reason to avoid improving your business practices.

Small businesses — even one-person companies — need to learn and integrate the best practices of project management because in small companies project failure is more likely and other project risks are higher. A project that is behind or over budget in a large company is often cushioned by access to more resources in the form of more money and more or better people. Small businesses don’t have this safety net. A project that goes off the rails for a small company can mean the difference between keeping the doors open and returning to a “real job” in Dilbertland. But many of these agile, innovative groups of entrepreneurs are the most resistent to picking up and trying out many of the best project management tools.

Why?

Excuse No 1: Project management methodologies are too bureaucratic.

Bureacracies are a characteristic of organizational culture and always exist because someone benefits from slowing things down or bungling things up. It is highly likely that this same someone created the metholodology that is being used. In other words, project management methodologies only create bureacracy if the leadership or members of the project team have the intention of mucking up the project. (Or at least lack the motivation to fix it.) But if the company (your company!) has the intention of creating higher quality and cost effective projects, then project management methodologies will help not hurt you.

Excuse No 2: We’re so small we don’t need a metholodology.

Do you tie your shoe a different way every day? Would you ask your employees to do the same? Without having a methodology, this is what small companies are asking themselves and their employees to do — re-invent the wheel for every project. This way of doing things can be very tempting, especially if you’re creative, innovative or just a freaking cool person. However, this also makes you really annoying to work with, more expensive to hire and less likely to deliver the quality product your customers have asked for. There is absolutely room for creativity and innovation on every project, and by definition, this is what a project is. However, if you plan to do everything a different way every time, you will undoubtably do something worse or much worse than you did it last time. Having a methodology allows you to keep the good stuff from the last project and re-invent the bad stuff. Try it. You’ll like it.

Excuse No 3: (My favorite) Our customers are special, and they have unique needs. We can’t serve them using traditional project management practices.

Well, well, well. Now the truth comes out. You are so good that you are above exhibiting basic human behaviors and possibly the laws of the universe. Now close your eyes and picture one of your customers or a member of your team. Is this individual a person? (I know, sometimes it’s hard to tell.) Traditional project management practices are designed to help real people and real projects succeed. They are designed to help you ferret out places where things could go terrible wrong (making you look really stupid). They are designed to help you make important, universe-alterating decisions (chocolate sprinkles or no chocolate sprinkles). And they can even make you more popular. Using good project management processes makes you a more knowledgeable, consistent and organized leader. People on your team will like this, and your customers will love it. It might even make you younger and better looking, too.

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What If Project offers leadership and project management coaching and consulting for small and medium-sized technology companies. For more information visit What If Project or contact us for a free consultation.