Ok so it s 8am on Saturday morning here in rainy Seattle. The legendary HarryB has opened the keynote with a overview of what s happening and passed the baton over to the Intel Dude (sorry missed his name). They started with a video in which they took the actual silicon from a CPU and showed it to users. Users had no idea that the brains of their computer was this little thing , and made comments that wow it looks complicated . These are typical comments that most users make about IT and the services that we offer. However whilst they recognise that its complicated they often do not give any credit to the amount of effort that we go to to make the complicated things look so simple. They do not realise the value that we as IT professionals bring to the table. Often though I think it s OUR FAULT. It s OUR FAULT when we fix something really hard and then say to them Oh it was nothing . They get the impression that yes indeed it was nothing for us to fix. That might be despite the hours of effort we ve put into investigating the issue. Then they get our bill for the time and protest but you said it was simple you see we make a rod for our own back when we flick comments like oh it s nothing We give the impression that we as IT professionals KNOW EVERYTHING. We do not VALUE the things that WE do ourselves. We write off time and then do not get the real value for our efforts. Stop being so modest guys. Take credit where it s due. Bill for the time you invest in solving a problem.
Good Morning, I am enroute to Seattle this morning, I needed to invest time in my family, just equally important. So we you all soon.
I would like to share a story that someone told me once about an engineer who was called out to a nuclear reactor to see why there were some serious challenges with energy output.
The engineer arrived and put on his white coat (sound familiar) and spent two days running tests, inspecting things around the reactor and after two days he took out his sharpie and put an X on the meter than was causing the challenge.
He sent his invoice in for $10,000 for the two days of work.
The plant supervisor got the invoice and complained to the engineer on why the price was so high and to justify this cost to his reactor.
The engineer replied “Cost to mark the X on the meter $1.00, knowing what meter to mark the X on $9,999.00”
I couldn’t agree more with the comments on valuing the services we provide to our clients. In our company there is no such statement “oh it was nothing” it costs money to know what checkbox to click, or what script to write. These things are the bread and butter to what we do as IT Professionals and we bring service to our clients.
Time to start billing for the value that we bring.
Stuart Crawford
Calgary, AB
http://blog.itsuccessmentor.com