This hammers through all the hourly estimates and gives me a cost based on my hourly rate, as well as displaying a project total in the status bar at the bottom of the window. I wish I did.īack to the Task view, and I expand all tasks, select all, and choose Structure -> Assign Resource -> JB. No, I don’t charge £100 per hour for development. I can set hourly rates, and how “available” I am for the project. Once I’ve gone through and assigned time estimates to each part of the project (practically writing the spec as I go, incidentally), I can then use OmniPlan to build timescale estimates and cost them up.īy selecting me (or creating a new resource) and viewing the inspector panel: This is all the kind of stuff you do when planning a project anyway, but the fact that you can make simple changes to subdivisions of tasks and have them percolate up your estimates automatically is a real boon for tracking complex projects. I now have a better feel for how easy or hard that’s going to be. No worries – I can nest the various sub-tasks to come up with a proposal: I might not have a good handle on how long, say, a progressively enhanced “personal content aggregator” might take to design. Let’s say, though, that I reckon one of those layouts is particularly complex because there are lots of variations. ![]() ![]() If I realise I need more layouts as I plan the project, in they go and bump up the cost in a fully justifiable way. I reckon each layout is going to take me half an hour to do, so in they go, and suddenly my visual design budget sits at 2 hours. Let’s say, for example, that in my first pass I reckon that I’ll need 4 layouts: The great thing about OmniPlan is that it tends to remove the best guess factor from most tasks. I then go through and start to apply time estimates to each task based on previous experience and “best guess” work. My first task at the start of a costing is to go through the default outline and prune what isn’t needed for this project, before adding in what is needed. Every task starts out with one hour assigned to it. ![]() Where do all these top line numbers come from? Let’s expand out all the items in Core Development outline:Īs you can see, the project timeline can now start to build itself from the bottom up. Just like any good outliner, the nesting facility means that I can group the project into discrete blocks, which is great for being able to produce a “top line” summary of what each area of the project will cost. Over the many years I’ve been doing this, I’ve developed a standard software development template that stubs out most of the tasks I carry out during a project. The amount of effort assigned to each node then translates into a bar on a Gantt chart, and also an addition to the project cost, once you’ve told OmniPlan who’s working on that node, and how much they cost per hour. Each node has a number of attributes, the key one being “Effort”. Just like OmniOutliner, you can happily drill down deeper and deeper into each “node” in the outline. The key thing for me is the fact that it uses an outline view for building up your project. I love Omni’s software ( OmniFocus runs my life, and OmniOutliner stores most of my most important notes), and OmniPlan is built with the same attention to detail as the rest of their apps. To do this, I use OmniPlan from The Omni Group. It’s also useful to know what particular features are expensive because they are difficult, and what ones are expensive because they’re valuable. ![]() This usually means justifying the cost of a particular job by being able to demonstrate to the client the effort involved in a particular area. When freelancing, I like my prices to make sense. I think it’s still relevant, so here’s a slightly updated version. This was an article that I originally published way back in 2008.
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