27 Dec
2010
27 Dec
'10
12:16 p.m.
Greetings,
Let me thank you for picking up this thread for discusion.
The umbrella organization should be consisting of trusted members
only. By corollary, Any member is equally trusted. The organization
itself is a member.
Trusted in the sense of financial transactions vis-a-vis authorities
2010/12/24 Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) <raju(a)linux-delhi.org>rg>:
On Friday 24 Dec 2010, Rajagopal Swaminathan wrote:
- What if more than one consultant is qualified to pick up a given lead?
How does the umbrella organisation decide internally which consultant
the lead should go to?
Roun-robin of course to begin with.
Often the requirement ballons and three of them giving a well
documented support for which the umbrella organisation should take
ownership
The organisation should be capable of providing permenant e-mail and
free internet access to all it member.
Every completion should be announced by the organization with
customer's requirement satisfaction comments verbiatim -- positive or
negative doesn't matter.
The membership fee should not be steep and should not prove to poor people.
Educational institutions should be charged as they anyway have money enough.
I was thinking of involving other interested goups like
instrumentation, CANbus, Power equipment vendors and the such.
FLOSS India can obtain the mandate of the LUG members with offer to
include them free of charge as tier-1 or tier-2 consultants. Here the
Philosophy and Praxis requires delicate balance as perceptions (and
hence values) can get altered dramatically.
- How do you rate the effectiveness of consultants?
If you and I are
charging respectively Rs 100 and Rs 10 for the same service, presumably
there is a qualitative difference between the sort of work we do which
justifies your higher rates. However, that is extremely difficult to
measure, and clients usually aren't in a position to evaluate core
technical competence vs hot air blustering. Sending the wrong
consultant to the wrong client will result in the organisation (and
FOSS) getting a bad name.
Let me attempt a very rough formula:
m - years of overall experience
n - years of relevant/specific experience
o - no of New projects executed
p - no of Maintenance projects under belt
q - total number of projects involved in and the percentage contribution thereof
r - a standard amount per shift or per activity basis (Say about INR
75/hour entry point)
s - a standard amount per year of Overall experience (applicable only
in case relevant/specific experience is > 0)
t - minmum premium the entity demands
, u, v
all the amounts with netiable/unnegotiable tag and subject to change
based on the suggestions of the list members.
I was wondering if Other LUGs could also pitch in in this thread.
It is in everybody's self interest and in the interests of
transparency and freedom.
- What happens if a consultant commits and doesn't deliver? We need to
devise some framework by which consultants can be lined up so that if
the first one fails there is another one ready to step into her shoes to
keep the project going. Again, failure to do this will result in severe
lack of client confidence. We also need to define success and failure
metrics in advance of projects, so that slippages can be clearly
identified and detected.
Documentation is the key here. I had the workflow of dotproject in mind.
I did mention about the three person and one umbrella organizaiton --
a total of four entities -- sharing the ownership of which anyone is
answereble.
There should be an agreed upon amount share for mitigation "Charges"
which can be arrived at during costing.
Apart from the organisational problems, there is also the issue of
continuity. We need to set systems in place that consultants are
mandated to use which describe the work done by them in fine detail.
This is required so that if one consultant is unable to take a second
project from her client, the next consultant has access to all the
configurations and customisations (with detailed reasons) so that she
doesn't have to spend days just trying to figure out how things are
currently working.
That can be solved simply by hosting the configuration/documents under an SCS
Above IMHO. Over to the floor...
Regards,
Rajagopal