The Cost of Things
June 14th, 2009 by Juuso
Is your team tracking what stuff really costs? Here’s some things to ponder:
- When I shop at grocery store (we go there bit over once per week), I multiply the price with 50. For example, if soda costs like 2 euros, I multiply it by 50, so that I know that it really costs me 100 eur (per year). After that, I think if I really need that soda (answer is yes: I get 2 bottles)
- In team meetings – let’s say 5 guys having 2 hour meeting – things can become pretty expensive. If it costs like $50 per hour (just random number), then having 5 guys in 2 hour meeting costs $500 bucks. Before having a meeting instead of thinking “we should have a meeting” you could ask “is this meeting worth $500 bucks?”
- When thinking about features, multiply the weekly salaries, and you can easily come with number like for example $20,000 (for some teams, again just one random number I picked from the hat). Now, when you think about adding features (and hear that it takes one week of your team’s time – $20,000 cost) you might want to ask “do we really want to do this”?
- And numbers get bigger and bigger when going in larger scale projections.
I don’t want you to get paranoid about anything and freeze (do nothing because everything costs). I just want to point out that sometimes it might be a good idea to think about where the time & money goes.
Another classic is spending hours checking out specs and reviews for something that only costs $50.
Heh, indeed.
Good one…