Focus on total costs more than soft benefits in your business case
Too many business cases forget the overlapping costs of delivering service during a change, ignore the impact to supporting organizations, and rely on soft benefits.
Don’t let the costs of your chargeback system outweigh the benefits
Demand management requires understanding how consumption is tracked and charged — but don’t create layers of checkers checking checkers.
Know whether you realized your benefits
Business cases are great decision support tools but need to be monitored to see if the assumptions were accurate or the benefits realized. Track and manage variances.
Vendor management skills are different than technical management skills
Corporate IT is evolving to be a vendor management function. It requires a deep understanding of contracts, finances, and technology – not doing the work.
Align all costs and resources with a service delivered
You will be surprised how much is spent on low-value, non-service-related activities. Understanding the true cost of each will drive the right behavior.
Clean up after every organizational change
Acquisitions, divestitures, and re-organizations present opportunities to save money by optimizing your third party relationships and eliminating low value services.
Software audits are on the rise
Don’t be caught without an understanding of what you are using and entitled to use. Software management both minimizes exposure and can reduce costs!
Subsidized charges drive bad behavior
Align costs with consumption to gain visibility to the true business value of IT spend. Cross-subsidizations will ultimately be exposed and cause problems.