Mark Richman provides expert advice, strategy, and software solutions to businesses worldwide. His clients range from the Fortune 500 to small businesses to startups seeking dramatic results. Mark creates and improves business-critical web applications, increasing productivity and maximizing profits.

Posts Tagged ‘consulting’

Thoughts on Value-Based Fees for Agile Software Projects

Here’s a quandary – we, as value-based IT consultants, aspire to charge value-based fees for our services (how obvious!). We know that doing so requires tight scope control. As such, this often requires a detailed specification. However, this is the very waterfall model that the agile movement shuns. How do you reconcile scope control, customer [...]

Evangelizing Yourself

A phenomenally inspiring presentation by Whitney Hess from IA Summit 2009. This really hits home for me, as I’m also a self-promoting introvert.

View more documents from Whitney Hess.

Questioning the Billable Hour part 3: Seven Industries

Situation A: Is Faster Service Worth More?
Your computer is not working properly. You have tried to understand the problem and find a solution that you can implement yourself. Yet, after trying, you are no closer to a solution, you find the situation aggravating, and you decide that there’s no point in continuing to attempt fixing [...]

Why I Never Bill by the Hour

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I’m an advocate of Value-Based Fees. In a nutshell, here is the value proposition to the prospective client:

There is a cap on your investment. You know exactly what is to be spent and there are no surprises.
There is never a “meter [...]

Determining Value-Based Fees for Software Projects – Part 3

I followed up on David Winch’s last points with some more of my own:
“Now, all I need is a few prospects on whom to practice! But I’m sure ‘how do I find clients?’ is a huge component of your workshop, so I do not presume to receive such a detailed response to that one.
“It is [...]