How to consult ethically to nonprofits

Ethical Consulting - Wednesday Session 1

• Thoughts and concerns in the room:
  • Keep things fair for both client and consultant.
  • How do we value labor?
  • How to keep hourly rates fair but sustainable?
  • How to keep expectations reasonable given capacity and budgets.
  • Billing for all the work we do.
  • Long-term health of the project.
  • For clients in the developing world: how to work with them ethically as outsiders, making sure people own their own tools.
  • Avoiding burnout.
  • Wanting to see a client’s work succeed, but running out of budget.
  • Concerns about undercutting other developers.
  • Tech work being overvalued by society, which allows us to set higher rates that we feel we ought to given societal inequity.
  • The fact that these conversations can be difficult.
  • Isolation.

• Common threads:
  • 1. Rates and billing.
  • 2. Organizational value and contributing to an org’s success (i.e. not just extracting money from an org), and not just extracting from an org.
  • 3. Well-being, and addressing our own needs as humans.
  • 4. Forming community around these issues, and being able to discuss them.

1. Rates

• How to determine a sliding scale that’s grounded in real needs?
• Value-based (as opposed to hourly) rates: can cause issues when a project takes longer than expected or scope creep occurs; however, hourly rates cause sticker shock.
• Billing time for educating yourself on new things.
• Idea: when “eating” hours, list them on invoice as pro bono to help foster a culture of valuing work.

• One common issue: Changes in the scope or depth that happens during a project necessarily causes a change in billable hours. The client doesn’t always understand this, and it can be difficult to communicate it.

• Ways to address it:
  • Padding/contingency hours.
  • Invoicing for project management.
  • Discovery phase as a separate work agreement, with a set of solid deliverables including a better estimate, including how much project management/communication time a client will need.

• Difficulties estimating projects, when each one is different.
  • Think about how long a project will take, then double it.
  • Charging overage at lower rates.
  • Be upfront about how the estimate might change depending on scope.
  • Limit scope to fit within a fixed budget.

• Other things to consider:
  • Understanding that the client might not understand how tech works, how long tasks might take, and how seemingly small things might be. https://xkcd.com/1425/
  • Lots of communication about how/when scope is changing. Collaboration with client: “How to we solve this problem together?”
  • Communicating a plan for overage hours ahead of time, like billing overage hours at a lower rate.

• Agile development: difficult with for NP clients; can work with focusing on what’s important, what’s achievable. Setting realistic expectations, and exceeding them if possible. Starting with significant discovery/kickoff meeting to really understand the scope of the phase/sprint/project.

• Other issues:
  • Mismatch of pacing and capacity with client and consultant; arranging it such that neither client nor consultant are waiting on each other.
  • When working as a sub-contractor, not knowing how much discovery has been done, what relationship is.

2. Not being an extractive entity.

• Pre-engagement to find alignment: the value of that stage being paid for, whether explicitly or as padding.

• Issues caused when we are upfront that discovery takes time, but less ethical other shops might make unrealistic promises.

• Requirements document/Needs assessment
  • Helps understand what a given budget will realistically allow.

• The RFP document.
  • Can be unreal if developed in isolation, as opposed to during a collaborative discovery practice. Can result in a product that ultimately doesn’t serve client or consultant.

• Guarding against doing discovery work on spec.

• Issues with aging invoices.
  • Understanding that work has value
  • Threatens our future work, our other clients.
  • Deposits and progressive monthly billing can help avoid aging invoices.

3. Community building: continuing the conversation.

• Aspiration Tech will host a listserv for technical consulting. Also, people can and should have meetups.

• Web of Change community, which can be problematic.