Business: DesignOps

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced my idea for a scoping and estimating tool that emphasizes transparency, puts the customer in control, and focuses on the work outcomes for piecework rather than hourly rates. Now, in Part 2, I’ll present a tutorial for creating this tool, while providing some theory on crafting a service business.

To build an estimation tool that meets your own needs, follow these steps:

1. Identify the services you’ll provide.
2. Perform a time-and-motion study for delivering each of these services.
3. Quantize and assign a price to each of your deliverables. (I use the term quantize to refer to the process of converting the value of a deliverable from an hourly rate to a discrete unit of work.)
4. Build a spreadsheet that includes each quantized element.
5. Refine the spreadsheet as necessary. Read More

Whether you’re doing business development for an agency or an in-house UX group, to win a stakeholder’s business, you must provide a value proposition that makes your services more attractive than those of your competitors. If you’re managing a project, a team, or a business that depends on the delivery of services, it’s essential that you negotiate the project scope and ensure your stakeholders understand what you’ll be delivering before beginning work. It’s also important to reconcile the project scope and track status along the way and to manage costs and stakeholder expectations—not to mention your contractual obligations.

In this article, I’ll describe the approach that I devised for scoping, estimating, and reconciling services at Phase II, an external agency, and have since applied as an internal service provider at Intel and The Home Depot. The scoping and estimating spreadsheet that I created has evolved over the years and now accounts for a far broader range of services than it did initially. My work, whether at Phase II or as an internal service provider has always focused on B2B (Business to Business) applications—meaning I am serving clients who have clients of their own. This is an important perspective to keep in mind. In a B2B context, your clients need to know the costs of services they’ll incur as quickly and transparently as possible, so they can, in turn, manage their change orders with their client. Read More

Throughout this five-part series, I’ve presented an approach to selling, estimating, and managing services that puts your client in control while letting you maximize your value. Using this approach lets you avoid billing by the hour. You can instead quantize your service offerings—transforming the time necessary to complete a task into a deliverable unit of value. In Part 4, I decomposed an example of a service offering, Craft an IA, into its constituent elements. In a detailed spreadsheet, I illustrated how you can break a single service offering into 24 separate deliverable units—only a few of which relied on hourly charges.

In addition, I discussed how you can leverage this approach to increase your value proposition with your stakeholders. By being transparent about the range and costs of your services with your prospects, you’ll increase their trust in your proposals. Giving your prospects access to your estimating spreadsheet lets you discuss all the possible services you might offer. By working with them throughout the estimating process, you can show that you understand their desired outcomes. By situating each service element within a design-thinking framework, you can help your prospects understand where changes in scope are most likely to occur. In illustrating to your prospects the relationships between your service elements and the larger design-thinking framework, you can communicate both that your approach is rational and logical and that your final scope of effort and resulting costs could likely change. Read More