Simple and complex services

I came up with the definitions of simple and complex services myself. These are extremes; the truth lies somewhere in between.

Simple servicesconsist of the same set of actions necessary for their execution, and, accordingly, leading to the same results. For example, selling a glass of lemonade. The client orders this lemonade, and the performer pours the lemonade into a plastic glass, takes money from the client and gives the goods. That's it, the service is completed. The client may or may not like the taste of lemonade, but if the drink meets certain requirements for ingredients, then it is unlikely to be possible to return the money for it.

Thus, if a freelancer organized a simple service (selected the desired flavor of lemonade, stocked up on glasses and stood behind the counter), then it will rarely need to be adjusted. And after a hundred or two glasses have been poured, all actions to provide it will be performed easily and almost automatically. Therefore, the remaining time can be spent on such important things as finding clients, expanding the range of services, scaling with the attraction of new employees.

When I first sat down to write this chapter, I could not remember ever performing any simple service myself. And even at some point I wanted to abandon this text so as not to talk about what I had not experienced. But I suddenly realized that literally a year before I sat down to write this book, I was still doing something suitable.

We are talking about my author's course on interface design. I compiled a training program, accompanied it with presentations and practical examples, made a one-page website with a presentation and began to gather students. And although the course took more than a month, in the end it became almost as simple a service as selling lemonade. After all, it had the same ingredients: a pre-compiled schedule with the same intervals, the same number of teaching hours from course to course, the same assignments and results checks.

As I gained experience in teaching, I made adjustments to the course, but with each iteration there were fewer and fewer adjustments. And after the third stream, I no longer worried about the program, directing my free energy and time to attracting new students.

As a result, a live course in its essence is much closer to the definition of a simple service, but sometimes circumstances arise: for example, due to one’s own illness in the middle of the program, something has to be redrawn.

Complex services. To carry them out, it is necessary to first formulate an approximate composition of future work and preliminary estimate its duration and cost. Moreover, in the process of providing a complex service, its composition may change for various reasons, which will result either in re-evaluation “on the fly”, or in work to the detriment of the freelancer or client. For example, a freelancer will spend more time and effort, but will receive payment based on the original estimate. Or he will do some work carelessly, trying to meet the old deadlines, and the client will receive a lower-quality result.

Most information technology services are complex. From the very beginning and until now, I have been providing one of the most complex ones - information systems design. Let me give you a clear example.

A client comes to me to design a website, the purpose of which is to sell information about water transparency in reservoirs for a specific period of time. The client has a rough idea of ​​what should be on this site, and we turn this idea into a set of functional requirements and record it in a document. Based on these functional requirements, I estimate the volume of my work and the deadline for its completion.

But during the design process, I find out and point out to the client that it would be nice for certain sections of the site to have additional functionality that would help users use the system more efficiently. And after another week, the client himself sees: something could have been done differently than specified in the functional requirements. Does this mean that I, as a designer, missed something during the assessment? Yes and no. If it was a simple project that I specialize in, then yes. But if people from different industries constantly come to the designer with projects of different sizes and types, then no.

Therefore, in such a situation, it is necessary either to conduct additional negotiations on revising our previous agreements and draw up an additional agreement for a new scope of work, or to take on this extra work and adjust the work calendar.

In such conditions, a freelancer has much less time to advance, since he constantly has to rearrange his work plans and adapt to unique situations.

The more complex the service, the more difficult it is to “package” it due to the large number of sudden circumstances that are important to declare before starting work and which can scare away the client.

And if a glass of lemonade can be sold for 30 rubles, and a prototype of an information system for 3,000,000 rubles, then in a year the lemonade seller may already have dozens of outlets, each of which sells 1,000 cups a day with minimal intervention from the owner of the network, and a year later the designer will be finishing this only large prototype, while simultaneously evaluating another one - and all this year his head has been working at full capacity without the ability to break away from the endless design process.

These were two extreme examples. In reality, everything happens somewhere in between. “Designers” begin to specialize in one thing and already spend less resources on the service itself, and “lemonade sellers” are stuck in the fact that they don’t quite understand how to scale what they do, without having in their arsenal the same enthusiasts with sparkling eyes as themselves. And when this idea appears, they can hardly be called “freelancers.” These will already be real entrepreneurs.

Which services - simple or complex - to choose, everyone decides for themselves. And I could advise freelancers with complex services to devote a little more time to sales, distracting themselves from continuous and labor-intensive work, and freelancers with simple services to sometimes take a break from sales and work on improving service and quality to the delight of their clients.