The Quality difference and the value factor

The Quality difference and the value factor

During the course of my work I come across many professionals with different rates and costs to do the same task of implementing and customizing software.

With regards to Oracle NetSuite which I have been practicing for more than a decade now - the market is full of vendors, contractors and resources delivering services in a wide range of costs. It can be as high as 10x the lower end of the spectrum, so obviously the variance is huge.

So, the questions arise -

What is the difference in the service ?

Why are tasks estimated high by some professionals ?

Why is the same service costing so varied between different vendors ?

The difference can be difficult to explain but I will just put a simple activity example here -

Scenario - a custom field is to be created -

Professional A - 

Created new Field

Completed.

Professional B -

Understand need of the new field

Check if the field is already available or any other relevant data already present across the system

Determine ideal field data type, defaults, and create the field.

Access /Restriction of the field to Users/Roles.

Apply to various forms and check the display type and User experience.

Test by entering some values and validations with different roles and real life scenarios.

Modify reports and queries wherever required to include the new created field.

Port to production, type help and document.

Completed.

While some of the above steps are optional, we cannot take away the fact that there is no substitute to quality and detailed work.

A simple activity as creating a field can get as detailed as this whereas when we talk about large scale implementations there are many a permutations and combination working which need a thorough evaluation before an elaborative implementation / custsomization followed by a detailed testing to ensure that the project goals are met.