Optimizing IT or Engineering In Tough Economic Times Through SEER
When economic times get tough one of the most difficult things for management is to determine the impact of slowed or killed projects, the impacts on maintenance, and further methods of achieving time to market with fewer resources.
Sterling Commerce in a presentation called “What’s Real Answers For Tough Time” pointed out some of the challenges and issues in the new consolidated banking, finance and other industries. The legacy is difficult including:
- Fragmented, Incompatible, Fragmented, Siloed Systems For the Pre-Acquisition Assets, and cost prohibitive to replace systems
- Difficult To Process new customers due to disparate systems
- Incompatible / Incomplete Business Processes so no one knows the status of customers
The article also pointed out that some organizations will just not spend any money while others will make the decisions and spend the money to have them emerge stronger. That article’s subtitle was “A Crystal Ball Won’t Provide the Answers Your Need” While I agree with the challenges listed by Sterling, I believe that a sort of Crystal Ball… SEER can identify the effects of decisions on business.
These points brought back memories of a prior banking consolidation of long ago when we received a call from our bank claiming we had drained all our cash and credit line and we were overdrawn. Turned out to be a “minor” software problem. And this happened twice. We still bank with them, but we thought seriously about changing at that time.
SEER For Management Decision Support
In order to make the proper IT decisions management needs that “Crystal Ball’.. the ability to forecast what will happen based on different decisions. A few of the many questions that can be answered include:
- Using SEER for software estimation to estimate the business value of a project portfolio and each project’s contribution to business value.
- Which projects should be killed due to lower chances of success
- Determine the impact on maintenance projects of limiting staff… Understaffing will cause the software to degrade over time and will likely cause it to not be as responsive to changes in user requirements
- What if we freeze Requirements TO Get A Project Done
- Evaluate the potential to ease schedule of projects underway to benefit from potential productivity improvements
- How have other in the industry performed under such circumstances
- Determine of outsourcing is a viable option from both a cost and reliability viewpoint
- What is the cost / benefit of heterogeneous development organizations (current ownership along with acquired organizations IT)
- Identify the costs of continued maintenance of an existing system versus a new system
- Find if Software as a Service outsourcing can reduce costs while providing the business value needed
- Determine the potential decreases in reliability from extending the life of existing hardware versus normal hardware replacement cycles.
A Few Examples
Determine the impact on maintenance projects of limiting staff… Understaffing will cause the software to degrade over time and will likely cause it to not be as responsive to changes in user requirements
Which projects should be killed due to lower chances of success
Evaluate the potential to ease schedule of projects underway to benefit from potential productivity improvements
Much more detail on SEER and its ability to make viable management decisions is available. Click here for the home page or choose “Sales Questions“
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
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