Running Cozy

Since most firms establish their hourly rates based upon reverse competition – that is, what your competitors charge – the cost component is completely arbitrary. I have yet to encounter more than a handful of firms that actually tie out their cost per hour to the general ledger.

Firms that value price do not ask, “What prices do we need to cover our costs and earn a profit?” Rather, they ask, “What costs can we afford to incur on this project, given the price obtainable from the client, and still earn an adequate profit?”

technical project go awry, stop estimating and start budgeting.

our budget is $500k, then we do have enough information. The answer is no, we can’t afford it. If our budget is $5M, then we do have enough information. The answer is yes, we can afford it. If our budget is $2.5M, then we do not have enough information.

Having a Just Culture means that you’re making effort to balance safety and accountability. It means that by investigating mistakes in a way that focuses on the situational aspects of a failure’s mechanism and the decision-making process of individuals proximate to the failure, an organization can come out safer than it would normally be if it had simply punished the actors involved as a remediation.

This idea of digging deeper into the circumstance and environment that an engineer found themselves in is called looking for the "Second Story". In Post-Mortem meetings, we want to find Second Stories to help understand what went wrong.

We accept that there is always a discretionary space where humans can decide to make actions or not, and that the judgement of those decisions lie in hindsight.

We accept that the Fundamental Attribution Error is also difficult to escape, so we focus on the environment and circumstances people are working in when investigating accidents.

Here’s what it can look like when project management and resource planning are decoupled: The project manager sets expectations for three team members to work 50% of their time on the project from date A to date B. There is a clear expectation and agreement that these team members can complete their tasks in that period of time. The project manager checks at least once a week to see how hours are tracking, which tasks are completed and which are coming up, and will regularly assess if the tasks left are reasonable for the time and budget left. This checks/balances approach essentially creates a mechanism for greater visibility and consistency, shared responsibility, reduced tension, and fewer surprises.

In place of task-based project planning, digital services companies should implement a duration-based approach. This is when a certain percentage of each role or a person’s time is allotted to client projects. Rather than assigning a certain amount of time for each task (1 hour for task A, 3 hours for task B), duration-based management assumes the employee will spend, for example, 50% of their time on a project for client C and 50% on client D. The expectation is that the employee will complete all tasks they’re responsible for during that time, and communicate with their manager or project owner if they need a longer window. Project managers can still manage the individual tasks or points that need to be addressed and completed, but budgets are not dictated based on the rollup of the small allocations of time across all of these individual elements.