David’s Thoughts

I’ve been reading lately (The Parable of the Two Programmers, and in Info World) that good planning can be more important than the implementation of the plans. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. The better the plans, the easier the implementation. If the plans are hair-brained, it’ll take a genius to make the plans work. Generally, does an increase of time spent planning result in a decrease of time spent implementing? Probably so, to a point. And it most likely also results in a higher quality result.

So, now to my main issue. Most clients only like to pay for you do DO something, not to THINK about doing something. If you create a better solution, you should be paid better, right? Even if it takes less implementation time, but more planning time? It might be one thing in a full-time environment, but it seems more difficult to work effectively in a freelance position. In order to accomplish a challenging goal, a process must be observed. There must be the discovery of needs; research regarding environment, resources, standard methods; planning how to fit together existing tools and create custom results. Only after that can you start the “real” work of creating/implementing the produced thing. And the better you did in phase one (preparation), the easier phase two (implementation) will be.
I’m speaking mainly from the background of programming and web development, but I think this could apply in many cases.

I’ve read that freelancers should sell value rather than time. I’d sure like to collect the thoughts of others on this. I tried googling “how to bill for good planning” but that didn’t turn up anything useful.