AP-005
Catalogue work is often discussed in hours because hours are practical.
A client asks for 100 products to be updated. The agency estimates the effort, checks the available budget and works out how much can be completed within the time available.
For the agency, hours help with planning. They help determine who can handle the request, how much capacity is required and what it is likely to cost.
For the client, they provide a way to understand the size of the request before approving it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement.
But once the requested changes have been completed, the client does not receive the hours that were spent.
They receive the catalogue after those hours have been applied to it.
Products may now contain more complete information. Similar products may follow a more consistent structure. Specifications may use the same terminology across a range.
The hours explain how much effort the agency used.
They do not, by themselves, explain what became better.
That distinction matters because the effort required to perform the work and the improvement created by it are different commercial questions.
An agency cannot ignore the effort required to perform catalogue work.
Someone has to inspect the products, make the changes, check the results and deal with whatever questions appear along the way.
A small request might take an hour. A larger range might require several days to complete. An unfamiliar catalogue may require more investigation than one the team knows well.
Time gives the agency a practical way to estimate that effort.
It also helps manage capacity.
If three clients all need catalogue work completed during the same week, the agency needs to know whether the team can actually do it. If a client has a monthly maintenance allowance, both sides need some way of deciding what fits within it.
Hours can therefore answer useful commercial questions.
Hours can help the agency estimate the effort required, determine whether the team has enough capacity and understand the likely delivery cost. They also give the client and agency a practical way to decide how much work can fit within the available budget.
Those questions remain important whether the agency charges by the hour, uses a retainer or incorporates the work into another service.
The difficulty begins when the measure used to understand the agency’s effort also becomes the main way the work itself is described.
Ten hours tells the client something about the amount of labour involved.
It does not yet tell them what those ten hours have improved.
Consider a product range where the same specification appears under several different attribute names.
The client asks the agency to update that specification across the range.
Someone may need to identify the different versions, determine which terminology should now be used, make the changes and check that the affected products are consistent afterwards.
The agency might describe the work as four hours of catalogue maintenance.
That may be exactly how the work was estimated and billed.
Once those four hours have been worked, the time is gone, while the catalogue retains the result: the affected products now follow a more consistent convention than they did before.
The same is true when incomplete product information is filled in, when similar products are brought into a common structure or when new products are added according to a clearer existing pattern.
The individual request is completed, but the result of the task becomes part of the catalogue that future requests will encounter.
This is one reason catalogue work can be difficult to understand when viewed only through individual tasks.
A client may commission a series of small changes over several months.
Each request may have its own estimate.
Each may be approved separately.
Each may appear on an invoice as another amount of time.
Yet the result does not disappear when the task is closed.
When the task is done well, the catalogue itself should be in a better condition than it was before.
That is different from saying every change creates the same amount of value.
Some tasks may correct a significant inconsistency. Others may be routine. Some changes may turn out to have little wider effect beyond the products directly involved.
What matters is that the time spent and the improvement created are not the same thing.
Imagine two agencies each spending five hours updating product specifications.
In the first catalogue, the requested values already sit within a clear and consistent structure. The team can spend most of the time applying and checking the changes.
In the second, the same type of request reaches a catalogue where similar products use different attribute names and conventions. Part of the five hours is spent establishing how the requested changes should be applied consistently before they can be completed.
Both agencies may have spent five hours.
Both may have completed the client’s request.
But the five hours do not tell the client whether the team simply applied an existing convention or also had to establish how the change should be made consistently.
The number of hours cannot tell us that difference.
Time becomes an even less reliable description of value when capability improves.
A team that knows a client’s catalogue well may recognise an inconsistency quickly because it has already established how that part of the catalogue should be handled.
A less experienced team might need longer to reach the same conclusion.
The more capable team may therefore complete the task in less time while producing an equally good or better result.
If hours are treated as the main expression of value, becoming more capable can make the agency appear to create less value simply because it requires less time to produce the result.
That does not mean time has become irrelevant.
Complex work may genuinely take longer. Large catalogues may require more effort than small ones. A difficult investigation may justify substantial time even when the final visible change is small.
But those examples reinforce the distinction.
Hours tell us something important about effort.
They cannot independently tell us how good the result is.
A client may approve an estimate in hours.
The agency may track those hours internally.
The invoice may calculate the cost directly from them.
The client can therefore pay according to hours without those hours, by themselves, explaining why the work is worth buying.
None of that changes where the result ends up.
It ends up in the catalogue.
A product range becomes more consistent.
Missing information is added.
Conflicting terminology is reconciled.
Those are the things the client continues to have after the agency has finished.
Hours and catalogue improvement therefore answer different commercial questions.
Hours describe the effort required to perform the work.
Catalogue improvement describes what that effort is intended to produce.
The two can be related without being interchangeable.
A larger piece of catalogue work will often require more time.
A more difficult catalogue may require more investigation.
But time alone cannot explain whether the catalogue has been improved well, whether the changes have increased consistency or whether they have left a clearer convention for the next person to follow.
When agencies describe catalogue services primarily through hours, the client can see the cost mechanism very clearly.
The improvement being created can remain much less visible.
Agencies do not need to stop estimating or tracking time in order to make catalogue improvement more visible.
Hours can remain useful for managing delivery, protecting scope, allocating capacity and calculating cost.
They can also remain part of the way a client is billed.
The more important distinction is between the mechanism used to cost the work and the way the service’s value is understood.
If a client approves ten hours of catalogue work, the agency should be able to explain what is expected to be better afterwards: perhaps the affected range will follow a more consistent structure, missing information will be completed or conflicting conventions will be resolved.
These are observable catalogue improvements. They do not require the agency to promise additional revenue or attach a financial value to every change.
They simply make the result visible alongside the effort required to produce it.
That gives catalogue work a different commercial meaning.
Instead of the service being understood only as time available for whatever maintenance happens to arrive, the client can begin to see how individual tasks improve the condition of the catalogue they depend on.
The agency may still sell, invoice and manage catalogue work through hours. But those hours describe how it is delivered, not the complete description of what the client receives.