[Sigia-l] site redesign sales proposals

[Ziya Oz]

Eric Reiss:

> After 20 hours of investigation, thinking, and discussion, it's
> generally possible to provide solid recommendations and suggest a
> realistic project roadmap.

The reason for spec work for free: convince the client that you can in fact
do the work they expect you to do by providing (at least) a sample of it.

The reason for scope work for a fee: create the strategy and blueprint for
the project.

I'm assuming we agree so far.

The reason I asked about the scope/budget of projects for which EUR 4000
would be adequate for the latter case is that 20 hours isn't remotely enough
to even begin to understand major enterprise sites/applications to come up
with recommendations and a project map.

I'm flabbergasted to hear that "airline with a broken booking engine" or an
"e-commerce site that isn't generating enough income from the long tail" can
be fixed with 20 hours of strategic consulting. Rethinking/redesigning
airline industry data gathering, flow, comparison, validation and
presentation are fantastically non-trivial. If Blockbuster's problems vs.
Netflix could be remedied with 20 hours of consultation, I wonder why they
haven't done it.

Admittedly, I deal with multi-million dollar projects that can take multiple
years to design and execute. But even if it were, say, a $500K project and
it took only 1/100 of that amount to come up with the strategy as you
suggest, chances are the problem space was very simple (the whole project is
being overpriced) or deep thinking simply wasn't done or you are at least
partly doing spec work or fees in Europe are really, really low.

My point is that if strategy and blueprinting (outcome of scope work) is the
foremost value creator for a project: everything else downstream then is
governed by it, how can any company justify spending, say, only 1/100 of its
budget on it?

I hope we're not referring to the same thing.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba