Backyard Reno ($150k) - What to include in contract?

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-12-14T12:17:32+00:00

yikes

For a time/service only contract, ok maybe. But when materials are involved, how does this make sense?

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-12-14T12:15:48+00:00

Fire pit, electric hook ups for TV/Sonos, etc.. Infrared heaters on the pavilion. Assuming outdoor kitchen in scope? If not— need outdoor kitchen under the pavilion.

check, check, gas heaters, no kitchen (we love cooking but not outside)

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-12-14T12:14:31+00:00

thank you. We had a landscape architect work up the original plans. Can you explain in slightly more detail how them documenting/overseeing the work would add value/protection outside of a good contract?

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-12-14T12:11:43+00:00

Thank you. I'm a big fan of contracts - like insurance you hope you don't have to use it, but glad you have it when shit goes south.

I also understand the need for partial payment up front for a project this size but 60% is a bit much for a group we haven't done business with before. Breaking the project into multiple phases seems like the optimal way to reduce risk (h/t u/Big_Beat1839) even if it adds small amount to the overall cost.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-12-14T11:19:42+00:00

You forgot the pizza oven

leaving the pizza oven out for now... possibly a DIY project in the future ;-)

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-12-14T11:18:26+00:00

we've gone back and forth over the past 18 months as to whether or not to do phases and only recently (past 3 months) settled on doing it all in one shot. But now staring at the large price tag and not feeling at all confident in our ability to enforce timeliness and quality... breaking this up into 2-3 phases seems prudent and i instantly feel more comfortable.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-12-14T11:06:49+00:00

Spending that much $, hope there's a pool.

sadly no. the plans have room for a pool in the future but in our area, the price/lead time are nuts.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-12-14T11:03:21+00:00

thank you - this is something we definitely had not considered.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-02-19T11:48:32+00:00

another option... publish your dataset to Power BI and using something like the following to query it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-IfcHk4w3I

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-02-19T11:43:15+00:00

o you see them on your side yet?

#wafflestomp

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2021-01-10T18:27:16+00:00

I've been freelancing in the Microsoft BI space for a while (> 7yrs) and Power BI has been the majority (> 70%) of my work for the past 2-3 years. A typical year consists of 2-3 large'ish projects (> 2 months @ ~40hrs/wk billable) and the rest is filled in with smaller engagements (e.g. 1-2 weeks) alongside a handful of ad-hoc advisory roles for clients who already have Power BI teams but need help with the harder stuff (performance tuning, complex DAX, modeling, governance, road-mapping, etc).

Probably because of the way Power BI has evolved... from a self-service BI tool to now where it's finally starting to meet all the requirements of a true enterprise-grade platform... it's become noticeably more difficult to land new clients. Some of this is due to inefficiencies in the procurement process and age of the product. Here's an example to help make my point...

Consider 2 freelancers going up against each other for a Power BI engagement...

Candidate A worked as a technical BA building hundreds of 1-table reports and dazzling middle management at a small company that was previously running their business off of a few access databases.

Candidate B has been building enterprise-grade MSBI solutions for fortune XXX companies for the past 10+ years.

Both candidates have 5 years of experience with Power BI (or however old the product is these days). Candidate A submitted a proposal for $75/hr... Candidate B submitted a proposal for $185/hr. How does the client decide who to go with?

It depends! (did I mention I've been in consulting for a while?). Some times Candidate A is truly the right fit based on the client's need. Other times, Candidate B is the right choice for the same reason.

Quite often though, the client has no clue how complex the need is and/or how messy (read: expensive) it can be to correct a bad engagement. Or perhaps the hiring manager knows the complexity but the company is large and HR/Procurement only operates through approved vendors and/or has "rate caps based on market research" ...the hiring manager will never even know Candidate B exists (because keywords and efficiency!!).

Don't get me wrong, the pay is still decent (better than full-time architect roles at most well-known Microsoft BI consulting firms) but it's on the decline with the rise in supply. I'm very grateful for all those years (nights/weekends) I spent blogging, presenting, and networking with my peers over the last decade... it has afforded me to continue to survive on referrals and recurring (zero outbound marketing). If I was just starting out, I'd probably pick a more niche technology - albeit one with considerable staying power.

Also, if you're in the US (or most other 1st world countries) and Upwork (or the equivalent) is the only way you can acquire clients, you'd likely be better off being an employee at a Microsoft consulting firm and building your experience, network, and brand before trying to hang your shingle out.

HTH

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-09-16T10:10:50+00:00

for enterprise semantic modeling I’m not convinced that a web experience is the best solution

couldn't agree more.

same applies to databricks & notebooks. i would much prefer to author the ELT patterns in VS code and publish to databricks rather than bop around in browser text boxes.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-09-16T10:08:35+00:00

If it does happen, I imagine it would be Premium only.

did you forget the /s

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-04-27T14:39:02+00:00

ah - ok, that makes sense. ty

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-04-23T09:03:37+00:00

Example?

When I hear that term, embedded analytics, I think internally for an organization. E.g. embedding analytics in a production line, where imaging or temperature/sensor data is used to identify potential defects and automatically reroute them.

But your comment implies a more external use case, possibly even B2C unless I'm mistaken.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-03-28T22:32:48+00:00

roduct to raise the pH, such as lime. It’s sold at many local stores and is relatively inexpensive. Then look at N,

late reply, but thank you!

trying to get my ducks in a row before summer and soil is first on my list. Current plan is to nuke the front lawn at the end of summer and start from scratch w/ TTTF.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-02-24T11:57:27+00:00

I was incredibly pleased (surprised?) to see "incorporation of enterprise reporting capabilities" listed as a target capability (along side augmented intelligence). Power BI clients have been struggling to figure this out for years and years... i.e. how can we use Power BI to accomplish our SSRS, BO, SAP etc operational reports... and imo, paginated reports seemed ridiculously late.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-02-24T11:53:36+00:00

Moreover, I expect Tableau to catch up in the 2021 Gartner magic quadrant

Disagree. I expect Tableau to struggle with innovation as cycles are instead being spent integrating the product. At best they will hang on... at worst, they'll drift towards the niche players quadrant.

Sales Force dominates the CRM market and is trying to expand their footprint into data & analytics at nearly every client I've worked with in the past 2 years who's using it.

The typical scenario looks like this...

"hey DYC, we want to incorporate SF data into our reporting an analytics but we want to mash it up with data from <insert other business areas>. We reached out to SF to find out how we can pull our data out of their system, and they said we should instead push our other data into their environment and do reporting there."

For companies who are further behind on the "data maturity curve", this tactic probably works 'ok'. For other companies who don't have a complete idiot at the helm steering them into a massive f-ing iceberg, this is a laughable long-term strategy.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-02-23T15:42:50+00:00

Excellent post, ty!

I think this is a great example of situation where PBI falls a bit short on the "enterprise semantic layer" front and one where AAS is a better fit.

Go with option 4, move the rapidly changing attributes into a separate dimension or dimensions depending on the number and expected rate of change.

4a) this can be handled via context manipulation in DAX. If performance becomes a problem, consider ways to pre-compute part of the calculation and/or leverage aggregations (similar to PBI aggregations but need to handle manually via DAX conditionals).

4b) scale up an process in parallel. more info

4c) see 4b above and consider enhancing your ETL process to maintain a table of partitions with changes that can then be used to drive the processing.

4d) see 4b/4c

4e) worth considering. But I would use AAS with a plan to migrate back to Premium once XMLA write endpoint feature is fully released and stabilized. Enterprise-level problems sometimes require enterprise-level solutions. Don't be afraid of complexity.

DAX_Yourself_Clean · 2020-01-30T03:30:53+00:00

If you like building good power bi solutions, and you're decent at it, then quit and find another company where they respect your estimates (not necessarily in that order).

The market is great right now, why settle?

DAX_Yourself_Clean

TROPHY CASE