Talk:Work agreement
Notes specific to our current IT support clients
We are charging a low rate in return for a no-quibbles relationship, meaning that the client should exhibit a reasonable level of trust regarding the amount charged for tasks, or the chargeable hours which accululate each month. These points have to be read and signed off by the client before the working relationship can commense or it will break down over time.
In IT when we give a quote prior to the job it is a quote based on everything going reasonably smoothly. Sometimes things do not go that way - there could be network outages, parts may fail, unexpected technical obstacles may crop up - these problems create additional chargeable hours which have to be done if the job is to be completed. An example is the few hours of work spent implementing a security extension which turned out not to be a very good one - those hours of work have still been done and have accumulated chargeable hours.
Sometimes hours are done which are not charged because we have deemed that it was our own bad choices or personal issues which we should take responsibility for ourselves. An example of this is when one of the robots overwrote all the confiuration files I had set up, I deemed this to be my own fault and fixing it up was not chargeable. A level of trust is required by the client in this respect, they must trust that we're making those decision honestly, because only the specialist performing the job can know best where the moral balance lies in a particular circumstance. If fine-grained accountability is required then more roles and hours would be necessary and the final charges would be far higher, for that kind of setup the client is advised to seek out a corporate such as Datacom for their solutions.
- The role of the wiki needs to be clarified and agreed upon - ie its not just a document repository, it's a workflow system and requires training to bring all users up to the level of categorisation and workflow understanding. The client may not think this is important, but the key issue here is that it's important to us not to have ongoing relationships with disorganisations, so if no suitable organisational system is already in place, then our one must be adopted - its very casual and simple, but its the difference between organised and disorganised.
- exit reasons and processes are needed for moving a new person into the IT support role and for
- We use our own choice of tools, we work most eficiently using our peers and wikis...
- I think that would belong in services which is separate from this doc (aran)
