Commercial scoping: days, ranges, and refusals

Estimate in engineer-days against a recipe whose steps somebody has actually run, and give a range rather than a number. The recipes here carry a day band each, and the band exists because the same deployment takes eight days in an organisation with an engineering team and twenty in one without.

State the basis with the number: which recipe, which slice, what the difficulty rating rests on, and what you assumed about the customer’s own capability. An estimate whose basis is written down can be argued with, which is the point.

Cost has three parts that behave differently: one-off implementation, recurring infrastructure or licences, and the ongoing human effort — review, correction, retraining people — which is routinely the largest and routinely omitted.

The cost tables on this site name their exclusions explicitly: electricity, cooling, rack space, offsite backup, hardware support, internal staff time and ongoing review. Adopt the same habit. Every exclusion you write down is a conversation you have already had.

If you have not read the vendor’s price, do not put a number in the document. This site prints an unestimated line with the reason rather than a zero, because a zero and an unknown look identical once they are in a total and only one of them is honest.

The same applies to currency: converting with a rate you did not source produces a precise-looking figure resting on nothing. State the currency you were quoted in, and convert only with a rate you can cite.