How much to charge for project management? $$

[Kantalope]

Am interested in finding out what y'all (or y'all's company) would charge to manage a project. How much per hour or would you do it a flat rates?

We are helping to integrate legacy systems into our database program for tracking occupational health data. We would be grabbing data from client's HR system and also sending data out to assorted systems. We would be helping the client figure out how to standardize a hundred or so different 'lookup' tables.

What do you think?

[szlamany]

That's a tough question without knowing your locale.

In the north-east US - that would be a $100/hour fee - give or take $50 (this is a truly rough estimate).

A lot would depend on the experience of the PM - the size and scope of the project itself - stuff like that.

One way to find these things out is to find out what an employement agency would do this for (but of course you don't want to give them a lead!).

[RobDog888]

Sounds more like you guys are writting a program/project and not just spec'ing it out and overseeing its on budget and time. This is more of a programming project I think but fees can be based upon an hourly rate or it can be done as a fixed price. Did you guys quote the client a dollar figure yet? Programming goes for $60 on up depending on the firm and programmer used. I have a minimum rate of $95 and so far have received a max rate of $150 and hour on a project. so you see it does vary on hourly projects but with fixed price projects there is only so much budget allocated and if you overrun the hours then your all making less per hour. Not a good thing.

[Kantalope]

Thanks guys even those rough estimates help me talk to the boss a ton.

- it is not much programming. Our software has utilities to read-in and send-out data to other systems but in the past we have just shown the clients how to do the work and sent them on their way. But with budget cuts and such more and more of our clients don't have the IT folks (that understand mapping) to do the work efficiently. And any IT staff they have doesn't have time to learn how to use the program to help make decisions about what data to use and how. We also run into trouble with integrating several separate sites that have been using some kind of legacy system that was never standardized. They could be using different codes for the same department or even worse the same codes for different departments and someone has to 'ride herd' on them to make the decisions about how to standardize. We can't make these decisions for them and we can't really tell what the old data is unless they tell us. But we don't want to spend hours and hours getting them to do their part for free either. We are calling it 'Project Management' - only because you can only get about $8 an hour babysitting.

ty
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[Al42]

And that little bugaboo called "data inconsistency" doubles the price.