Corporate Library

SEER for IT

Webinars

IT (Non-Software) Estimation: Moving From Art to Science

With calls by senior management to "run IT more like a business," CIOs are under pressure to impose more formal processes on IT activities. Therefore it is crucial for your IT estimation best practice to develop an early and accurate assessment of project costs, schedules, and risks as well as ongoing support. SEER for IT can help you build a knowledge repository of your IT estimation best practices, helping you meet the challenges of improved performance.

Discussed are the characteristics and attributes of the SEER for IT application and how they address crucial needs of the IT shop.

IT Infrastructure, Services, Operations and Project Estimation

In today's global economy, Information Technology is a critical component of many companies’ core business operations, impacting operational efficiency, customer relationship and the bottom line. These organizations need an agile and responsive IT organization with capability to support dynamic business goals. That means IT teams today must take on a much more diversified class of projects and initiatives. IT teams must also be part of the business case evaluation team to determine feasibility and advisability of not only IT project development, but also to understand the cost impact of these initiatives through the complete project life cycle. In order to quantitatively and qualitatively have the data to make these important judgments and compare projects competing for finite resources, management needs a framework for developing IT project estimates and plans. For CIOs and business partners to make sound technical business decisions, this framework must provide objective, standardized and consistent information so projects can be compared equitably.

This presentation will introduce such a framework and will culminate with showing how an estimation and planning model can focus on IT development, infrastructure acquisition, deployment, support, and ongoing business operations.

The Business Value of IT

This presentation seeks to highlight the role that good estimation has to play in the delivery of value from IT to the business.  Too often, IT projects and operations fail because business expectations are unrealistically high in terms of what can be achieved in a given time at a given quality and budget. And too often, IT providers have unreasonably low expectations regarding the same. What is lacking on both sides is knowledge of what can be realistically achieved by combining a clearly prioritized set of business needs with well-established IT industry best practices. This presentation identifies six key areas for business value from IT and explains how SEER for Software and SEER for IT play a role in all of these areas.

Six Truths You MUST Learn about IT Estimating

Revealed:

1. Valuable information on improving IT estimation performance.
2. Developing an early and accurate assessment of project costs, schedules, and risks as well as ongoing support.
3. Building a knowledge repository of your IT estimation best practices, helping you meet the challenges of improved performance.
4. Easily defining the work required, as well as patterns for typical organizational approaches.
5. Creating custom Knowledge Bases and perform analyses with metrics derived from company project histories and task labor standards.
6. Quickly summarizing and communicating project outcomes, alternatives, and work-in-progress.

Estimation for information technology projects often yield inconsistent performance. At the end of the presentation you will understand the challenge of IT estimation and how the SEER for IT application gives you an advantage in improving your IT project performance.

IT Project Estimation with SEER

SEER for IT provides knowledge based parametric estimates for IT projects and their ongoing support efforts. SEER for IT was designed for IT professionals, enabling organizations to develop an early and accurate assessment of project costs, schedules, and risks as well as ongoing support.

SEER for IT helps you to estimate, analyze and evaluate your IT projects through the use of a combination of parametric algorithms, industry knowledge bases, and your own data. SEER models are easy to use by both technical and non-technical people.

  • Practical input drivers – intuitive / easy to understand
  • Comprehensive results – detailed and high level
  • Enterprise ready – scalable to any organization
  • Adaptable – utilizes common project patterns
  • Learning – incorporates cost history
  • Risk driven – estimates capture uncertainty
  • Open - easy to integrate/interface with other systems
What Would You Like to Estimate Today?  SEER Estimate by Comparison

With SEER Estimate by Comparison, good estimates based on intuition are only a few comparisons away.  By stepping through a series of intuitive comparisons to better-known items, SEER Estimate by Comparison provides a credible basis for accurately determining either quantitative or qualitative values for both SEER and non-SEER parameters.

In a portfolio analysis exercise, we will demonstrate how multiple software projects’ sizes and value can be simultaneously estimated.

Discover Hardware Oriented Applications for SEER-IT

SEER-IT is a versatile application that enables you to estimate IT infrastructure deployment as well as operations. It is easy to see how SEER-IT can be used to estimate deployment and support of enterprise IT systems. However, SEER-IT can be very effective in estimating the deployment and operations of systems that use custom hardware interconnected by IT based technologies.

This presentation will show:

  • How SEER-IT can be used to estimate the deployment and operations of the IT based technologies prevalent in network centric systems (NCS).
  • How to estimate the required systems engineering needed to bring estimating
  • Where and when to use SEER-SEM, SEER-H and SEER-IT for different components of a NCS
  • Examples of a SEER-IT estimate for NCS and hardware oriented systems are included

 

Presentations

The Business Value of IT

Michael Harris - President, David Consulting Group

This presentation seeks to highlight the role that good estimation has to play in the delivery of value from IT to the business.  Too often, IT projects and operations fail because business expectations are unrealistically high in terms of what can be achieved in a given time at a given quality and budget. And too often, IT providers have unreasonably low expectations regarding the same. What is lacking on both sides is knowledge of what can be realistically achieved by combining a clearly prioritized set of business needs with well-established IT industry best practices. This presentation identifies six key areas for business value from IT and explains how SEER for Software and SEER for IT play a role in all of these areas.

SEER for IT
Forrester’s Five Essential Metrics for Managing IT

A recent report by Craig Symons of Forrester identified 5 core metrics for managing IT. This paper is full of wisdom such as "metrics for its performance must measure relevance and business impact"... effectiveness metrics rather than operationally focused metrics such as downtime.  To read more, Click here.

 

Government IT Project Woes and Estimating Total Ownership Costs

A recent government report showed 81% of budget or $57 billion in IT projects in danger of failing. Detailed reports on the hearings can be found here. Of 413 IT projects identified by OMB and federal agencies NEARLY 80% OF THEM WERE IDENTIFIED AS HAVING BEEN POORLY PLANNED. The scorecard for IT projects shows much progress but much work left to do.  To read more, Click here.

The Total Ownership Cost of IT Systems

It is interesting to see how the much of the industry speaks of IT system cost problems while ignoring a large part of the problem. Software maintenance can be 75+% of software total ownership costs but IT Infrastructure and IT services can be 60% of the total ownership cost itself. Even if we use cloud computing most of those IT service costs don't go away. Help desk, data conversion, etc. is still a problem, even in the cloud.  To read more, Click here.

SEER for IT: The Making of a New Product and Lessons Learned

Measurement certainly requires looking to the past to learn of the future. But there is a huge amount to be learned from the lessons learned themselves. Looking back on the SEER for IT development there are several lessons learned that go beyond just the measurements. To read more, Click here.

 

IT Cost of Rogue Users

Many of the problems firefighters face are due to persons who refused to evacuate when told to. Learn how this impacts IT. For example... items such as those who hook up their own wireless routers or use different cell phones than those certified by the company. Then expecting support for their unique configuration.  To read more, Click here.

What’s New and “Dan Galorath on Estimating” - by Dan Galorath

What's new and what's coming in SEER will be featured.

Additionally Dan will discuss selections from his blog. Dan will discuss selections from metrics, effectiveness measurement, the real costs of a variety of undertakings, what is ITIL versus ISO 9000, the risk of IT projects, what the assets of failed banks really are worth, and lots more. He weighs in on a wealth of topics both timeless and contemporary.

 

Whitepapers

Implementing an Estimating Process

Introducing a process, a method and a technique is in many ways comparable with the introduction of a new or enhanced information system. The IT project brings together software, hardware, infrastructure, organization and people. The project is structured with stages for development, transition to support, run & maintain and implement. Why not apply the same structure to implementing an estimating process?

Implementing a Metrics Program: MOUSE Will Help You

IT projects bring together software, hardware, infrastructure, organization and people. An IT project is structured with stages for development, transition to support, run & maintain and implementation. Why not apply the same structure to implementing a metrics program? However a metrics program is not equal to an information system - this requires different activities and stages.

 

Case Studies