Summary

We once saw an executive specify a countrywide sub-second response time for a “Staff absentee notification” transaction in a HR system. This executive had no idea that this unnecessarily high performance specification would increase the delivery and ongoing cost of their HR system by millions of dollars a year.

Conversely, we have also seen systems developers make changes to system specifications to reduce delivery and ongoing costs that, unbeknown to them, nullify the whole point of the system’s development.

Your system’s performance and other criteria determine its delivery and ongoing costs. As the business has to pay for these costs, the business should define the cost drivers. But normally no one in the business has the knowledge to define these cost drivers.

Our “How to control your system’s costs” Guide gives you in business terms the parameters and trade-offs involved in determining the top 12 systems cost drivers so that you can control your system’s delivery and ongoing costs.

As every system’s cost bases are different, this Guide cannot calculate the relative cost of the different options, but it can explain which are the most and least expensive and what you gain or lose with each choice. We also give you a recommended choice if you choose to use it.

The net result is that you define, on an informed basis, the 12 key cost driver parameters for your project in a way that you can communicate and reinforce to your project team. These, in turn, provide guidance to the system developers and ensure you don’t get a Rolls Royce when you wanted a Ford, or an under-powered solution when you need ultimate power. You’re in control.

We also give you the opportunity to specify any key design criteria that you want everyone on the project to remember.

Some years ago, as Sponsor, we commissioned two new systems — a new data capture and a reporting system. During development, a systems programmer decided it would be more efficient to join the two systems together, and did so. The result was a single, inflexible system, which is what I had already and commissioned the project to replace. This taught us the importance of specifying the key design parameters for your project.

For major and complex systems, you may need to specify your cost and performance drivers for several different parts of the overall system. The issues and trade-offs are the same.

Benefits

This Guide

1. enables you to decide, on business terms, the 12 major cost drivers for your project (or sub-project as appropriate)
2. gives you a means of communicating your priority design criteria to the project team and, especially, the technical team
3. provides a benchmark that the acceptance of the system can be evaluated against.
4. puts you, the business, in control of your ongoing systems costs.

Who should read

This Guide is designed to be read by those accountable in the business for specifying or approving the systems and their related costs. This can include Sponsors, Steering Committee members, key business stakeholders and the PMO.

Contents

1. How to specify your critical system service level, quality and cost drivers
2. How to define your requirements criteria
3. How to define your interfaces criteria
4. How to define your data management criteria
5. How to define your data security criteria
6. How to control your solution selection
7. How to control solution delivery
8. How to control your solution’s speed of delivery
9. How to control your system’s availability requirements
10. How to control your system’s response requirements
11. How to control your system’s ongoing operations requirements
12. How to control your system’s ease of use requirements
13. How to control your system’s standards compliance.

In addition, we also provide you with some additional supporting tools and resources to make use of this Guide easy and effective