Article: Pricing your work

Posted May 30th, 2008 by R Blank

Howdy all:

Opera (the browser) asked me if I could convert my two Rich Media Institute nanocamps on Business Topics for Rich Media Professionals -- Service Contracts and Pricing, Bidding and Budgeting -- into a six-part series of articles for the Opera Developer Community site.

The first article, Pricing Your Work is up.

An extract:

My MBA thesis was a study of the freelancer-based operations model of the entertainment and real-estate industries, both of which feature large project budgets and are also heavily contractor-based. One of the issues I found to be core to the ability of these industries to function is the maturity and standardization of the roles involved. By having established standards and practices, teams can be assembled from a wide variety of sources, come together, execute very large projects in relatively rapid order, and then dissolve, with individual members moving on to different projects.

These standards encompass both technical issues (we've all inherited projects that had to be scrapped because the original creator was no longer involved, and he did not utilize general standards), as well as business issues.

I believe our industry is working quite rapidly on establishing technical standards. From code-design patterns and frameworks, to open standards for data formatting and cross-platform communication (such as web standards). I believe we are seeing the rapid maturation of the tools we use on a daily basis.

However, from a business perspective, the interactive industry has almost no standards. There are few established models for operations - especially freelancer- and contractor-based operations - in the way that, for example, the Graphics Art Guild establishes with their annually-updated guide on the standards and practices of their industry.

Article: Pricing your work

Good summary of the issues