Productized Consulting Service Design
Five sheets and four documents that measure how often each deliverable recurs against how much of it survives, then price the spread.
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Variation Analysis · Coldharbour Advisory · 9 engagements of one service, 30 months
Two numbers per component, and they disagree
| Component | In | Reuse | Mean | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Report and board pack | 9 of 9 | 83% | 28.3 | Core, templated |
| Interview programme | 9 of 9 | 81% | 32.7 | Core, templated |
| Data request and validation | 9 of 9 | 78% | 25.2 | Core, templated |
| Technician utilisation | 9 of 9 | 22% | 30.0 | Core, input request |
| First-time-fix analysis | 8 of 9 | 31% | 20.4 | Core, input request |
| Travel and route density | 7 of 9 | 24% | 16.3 | Core, input request |
| Contract profitability | 5 of 9 | 61% | 23.2 | Priced option |
| Warranty and recall | 2 of 9 | 12% | 26.5 | Named out of scope |
| Reuse high | Reuse low | |
|---|---|---|
| In nearly every one | Core, and a template earns its keep. 10 components, 188.4h | Core, but a slot with a specified input. 3 components, 66.7h |
| In some of them | Priced option module. 2 components, 39.2h | Out of scope, named on the page. 5 components, 119.5h |
The three lowest-reuse rows on a twenty-row sheet are all core, and all three are the analysis. The practice had called those three its product, and the data request, interview programme and report its plumbing. Reuse says 26 percent against 81.
Page one for this query is one instruction, repeated. Audit your last ten to twenty engagements, find the high-frequency low-customization work, package it at a fixed scope and a fixed price, then build an intake questionnaire and a delivery checklist. The most advanced version asks what you could remove and still deliver 80 percent of the value. Every one of those audits is done from memory, at the level of the whole engagement, and nothing in it is counted.
So frequency gets mistaken for reuse. Here every past engagement is broken into deliverable components and each one gets two separate numbers: how many engagements contained it, counted off the record, and how much of the artifact carried forward unchanged, measured off the files. Where the two disagree is the productization decision, and they disagree on the analysis. Coldharbour Advisory's three analysis components sit in nine, eight and seven of nine engagements at 26 percent average reuse, the three lowest rows on a twenty-row sheet.
The second half is the price. A fixed fee cannot be adjusted afterwards for what the work cost, so it is set at the p90 of the past engagement totals rather than their mean. That is 273 hours against 245: a $58,500 fee, where pricing the mean would have given $52,645 and four of nine would have run over it. The floor behind it comes from the rate card pack, the practice around it from the practice dashboard, and the boundary becomes terms in the statement of work.
What's in the pack
Variation Analysis
One row per component carrying inclusion, reuse, mean hours, range, coefficient of variation, the named driver behind the spread, and which of four cells it lands in.
Engagement Component Matrix
The raw evidence: every component against every past engagement with hours in the cell, imputed cells flagged, plus the fee and effective rate each one collected.
Standard Effort Model
The core at the mean and at the p90, before and after the drivers move, with the fixed fee derived from the second figure and the floor rate it has to clear.
Scope Boundary and Triggers
Every component placed as in the fee, a priced option, or named out of scope, plus each trigger with a test that is checkable before signature and a price.
Deliverable Template Register
The artifacts ranked by reachable hours, mean hours times reuse rate, so templates get built in the order the arithmetic gives rather than the order that feels right.
Service Definition
The client-facing boundary: the fee, the window, what arrives, what the client provides, what is named out of scope with its price, and where the price changes.
Delivery Playbook
The internal version: the entry check before signature, the week-by-week hour allocation, and how the low-reuse analysis components get a specified input instead of a template.
Sales Materials
The one-page summary and the objections, with every claim traced back to a row on the variation analysis rather than to a number somebody liked the sound of. A live bid still goes through the proposal pack.
How the Product Was Derived
The full worked example: nine engagements, twenty components, two drivers moved, the fee at the p90, and what the product deliberately does not fix.
Frequency is not reuse, and the difference is the product
The standing rule. No component enters the core on inclusion alone, and a wide component gets a named driver before the fee is published. A driver that fires later is a change order.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack and send the past engagements of one service, or download the four Word documents and five CSV sheets and work the arithmetic yourself.
- 2
Decompose into components, not phases
One artifact per component, fine enough that client-specific variation lands in its own row. Then hours per component per engagement, at whatever grain the records hold.
- 3
Count inclusion, measure reuse
Inclusion off the engagement record. Reuse off the delivered files against the previous client's version of the same artifact, counting adapted content as half.
- 4
Price the p90, then move the drivers
The fee comes from the p90 of the engagement totals, because a fixed price is one not subject to adjustment for the contractor's cost experience. Then each named driver becomes an obligation, an exclusion or a trigger.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. The download is Word documents and CSV sheets, no account and no card. Edit with AI is the optional half: River decomposes your past engagements, measures both numbers per component and derives the fee. The rest sit in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Four Word documents and five CSV sheets in one zip. The sheets carry the columns that do the work: inclusion, reuse rate, mean and range of hours, coefficient of variation, the named driver, and the four-way decision. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open them directly.
How many past engagements do I need?
Eight or more makes a p90 worth publishing a price against, because a fixed price belongs where the risk can be predicted with an acceptable degree of certainty. Four to seven is directional and the sheet says so on the row. Below four, one bad engagement moves the p90 further than any driver you could name.
Why measure reuse when I already know what recurs?
Because the two answers differ, and predictably. In the worked example the three components the practice called its product average 26 percent reuse while the three it called plumbing average 81. Templating on frequency alone builds the wrong three artifacts first.
Why price at the p90 instead of the average plus a buffer?
A fixed price is one that places maximum risk and full responsibility on the contractor, so you hold the whole distribution rather than its middle. Set at the mean, four of the nine past engagements would have run over the fee, the worst by $6,516 of margin.
What if a component varies too much to include?
Name the driver, then choose an instrument. A fixed price is defensible where the uncertainties are identified and their cost impact estimated. Rebuilding utilisation with no job-level labour time cost 20.5 hours twice, so it is quoted at $4,500 rather than absorbed.
Does a fixed fee mean I earn less?
Not in the example. The fee plus options at the historical attach rate is $64,056 against a bespoke mean of $62,778. What changed is the boundary: 119.5 mean hours of previously absorbed work are named and quoted, and the effort range fell from 88 hours to 60.
Measure it before you package it
Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or send River the past engagements of one service and get the four-cell decision and a fee with a distribution behind it.
Edit with AI