Large IT Project - Estimations?

We are a small IT company that has been in business for nearly 5 years. We have an office on main street and service all things computers - residential and commercial. We have quite a few commercial contracts where we manage their networks, websites, etc. We are located in a very small town surrounded by even smaller towns.

Had a meeting today with a local business and the project they would like us to bid on is quite large. They currently have a main office and one branch office. They currently use SBS03 with around 30 users. They use SBS primarily for AD and Exchange. They will be opening up 2 more remote offices and 6 smaller (1 computer) branches soon. They plan on having over 100 employees in the near future so SBS is out and Server 2003/2008 is in.

So... we will be handling everything: ordering new hardware for all the new employees, new server, new everything. We will be setting it all up... physical and logical. We will be handling tape backups, day to day duties and everything else that goes into a project of this magnitude. We will also be designing a website and hosting that for them. I won't go into heavy details but in the end we will be setting up a few Server 2003/2008's and a separate Exchange server for over 100 employees branched over 9 locations. We will be doing the physical wiring, purchasing, setup, migration, and so forth.

While we can certainly perform these duties... we have never had a request for one of this size.

Any ROUGH thoughts, based on what I wrote (there is more we will be doing but I cannot divulge too much), on what a good bid for labor would be (excluding hardware costs)? Obviously I could supply MANY more details but I wish to refrain from that if possible as I am looking for an extremely rough estimate. I really ask just to hear other POV's. Please be respectful of my question and don't bother answering if you don't have an answer. We don't need to worry about hourly rates or anything like that... doesn't matter if it takes 80 hours or 250 hours. I am only looking for a very rough range to see if I scaled correctly.

I would like a price for both setting it all up to the point of working and then yearly costs for 24/7 support and maintenance for all the offices including on-site daily checkups for the servers.

If there REALLY is some info that you just really really need, let me know.

Keyword: Rough

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sexion8

terces wrote:

So... we will be handling everything: ordering new hardware for all the new employees, new server, new everything. We will be setting it all up... physical and logical. We will be handling tape backups, day to day duties and everything else that goes into a project of this magnitude. We will also be designing a website and hosting that for them. I won't go into heavy details but in the end we will be setting up a few Server 2003/2008's and a separate Exchange server for over 100 employees branched over 9 locations. We will be doing the physical wiring, purchasing, setup, migration, and so forth.

Keywords:Not enough information is given to give you a realistic baseline.

For starters you state you will be ordering a new server, that server will also need an UPS, what about switches, what about software. So we take baseline here from a (pseudo) reputable outlet and say you go with Dell, what will it be 1U's, Blades? Blades are more cost effective. What about redundancy. Are you going to be doing DB related work, if so how much, I mean we do have to take memory into consideration here. Storage, are they a company which has to follow regulatory controls, aka SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, if so, there are storage MANDATES. There are a lot of things you will see posted and "rough" will be so off the mark it will likely confuse you more.

I'm currently doing a project management on a client, 14 locations 200+ users, all firewalls throughout every location with a central office all firewalls need redundancy. I provide the failover on the firewalls (dual ISP providers) you name it. The best approach I found is, get as much information as you can about what is necessary for you to fulfill your job. Go a little on the excessive side as opposed to the conservative side. Spend as much time necessary with your client so you don't fumble the ball.

For example, if you know you need one mission critical server but you need failover, you might not have the budgetary constraints at the moment to purchase it, or you might not be able justify the costs immediately. Does this mean it should go to the backburner. Then what happens on that critical date. Failure which won't look good in the end for you. So what then. Take a few to perform an impact analysis on what takes precedence over what. Don't necessarily cut corners, be focused on your goal.

It's hard throwing a number out provided I could have said: x amount of servers * PRICE = This is your answer. It's not realistic. I nor anyone else will have a realistic idea of what to tell you and if they do, I'll gladly help them take their shoes out of their mouths afterwards.

undomiel

I just wanted to point out that there are conversion licenses available for SBS2003 to convert on over to Standard or Enterprise. That should help save you the headache of migrating off the SBS2003 server if you wanted.

astorrs

undomiel wrote:

I just wanted to point out that there are conversion licenses available for SBS2003 to convert on over to Standard or Enterprise. That should help save you the headache of migrating off the SBS2003 server if you wanted.

Yes its called the "Windows Small Business Server 2003 Transition Pack" and will allow you to save the existing investment in Windows/Exchange CALs. WIth that in mind I have to echo what sexion8 said.

terces

Thanks for the replies; I am not interested in costs associated with acquiring hardware or CAL's or anything like that. I am interested in pure labor fees.

sexion8

terces wrote:

Thanks for the replies; I am not interested in costs associated with acquiring hardware or CAL's or anything like that. I am interested in pure labor fees.

Again, you're not giving anyone much to go on. Your profile doesn't state your location so how is anyone supposed to guess what is a baseline in your area. I can tell you from the jump when I'm called to do something, its usually @ 200.00 per hour even if I drink coffee. Does that tell you anything... No right.

Get an average on the costs by doing an assessment of what others in your area are charging. This is the safest bet if you ask me. No one will know your overhead here, your region to make an assumption/best guess. The going rate for cabling, manual labor varies, I gave you an estimate of what I would charge in the Northeast.

w4nn4b1337

Make sure you have a "due dilligence" clause in your contract. That means that after you under bid everyone else to get the contract you can do a more detailed assessment and find out the acutal cost of the contract after its awarded. Everybody knows that it is impossible to get all the details and all of the requirments the first time around. You can adjust your orginal bid with contract mods as the project moves forward.

However, if you just want to figure out how to bid on labor just figure out how much it will cost to have a full staff for the hours contracted and cut it in half. You can always complain about the work conditions, fire breaks in the walls, unforseen problems to add more hours and people to the project. That will drive the labor costs up and actually pay for the real costs.

That's how they bid on federal jobs anyway.

TechJunky

If you are going to be doing any clustering with SAN stuff for exchange I would bid some good hours into that project alone. Moving mailboxes takes a lot of time. Make sure you are checking into the que disk space you are going to need. Our last engineering team thought they knew what they were doing and now we are having a heck of a time moving the users mailboxes to a new SAN. It took us a good 10 hours last night to install the fiber cards, allocate the SAN space and setup the disks in Windows. That didn't even count for any user mailbox migration.

You will be doing A LOT of planning.

I would recommend TLS type connections for the remote offices. Make sure you account for any database access (including exchange) they might use across the TLS/VPN connections so after its all said and done it doesnt crawl like a slug.

Trust me, my office connection from where I am at to the main datacenter is rediculiously slow and it drives me nuts everyday. It takes a good 20 seconds everytime I click on My computer because of the mapped drives.

Dont go cheap, do it right the first time.

macdude

How many hours do you think it will take? Where I work we charge a flat rate of $130 an hour. So if we say a project will take 20 hours, we times that by 130. So a 20 hour project would be $2600. That is just in labor. But we do estimates we let our clients know that a 20 hour project could go up to 25 hours or more depending on if they have any last minute changes they want.