The economy is down the tubes and so is your budget. If you keep thinking you have to do more with less, you’re wrong. In these tough times the goals should be doing less with less.
In times of economic chaos and budget cuts you need to check your perspective. You know the old saw: A pessimist sees the glass as half empty; the optimist sees it as half full. These are both wrong ways of looking at the problem. The realist’s perspective, the right way, recognizes that when there’s space above the contents the glass is simply too big.
How you see something (and for that matter how you talk and write about something) determines how you deal with it and, interestingly, both the pessimist and the optimist will tend to see the solution in the same way; they’ll see the contents as the problem and want to do more with less. The realist on the other hand sees the problem as one of redefinition – the glass is the problem. This approach is about doing less with less.
Now doing less with less in IT might sound like an episode of Mission Impossible or MacGyver, but here’s the rationale: You’ve been building up your IT infrastructure for years – that’s your glass. Given current circumstances, the contents – your budget – now needs to be re-examined to figure out what IT really does and where the money really goes.
I came across a great example of this in a conversation I had with an insurance broker and an IT manager recently. We were talking about how IT-related claims were handled and both admitted reimbursements never cover the full cost of losses.
While, for example, the cost of a stolen laptop might be reimbursed, the actual costs involved with analyzing what was lost, receiving the replacement, setting it up, installing and configuring it, and the lost opportunity cost are rarely, if ever, factored in. In fact, should you do a complete analysis of this issue for your own organization you might find your insurance is totally inadequate.
This is the stuff that makes IT budgeting so difficult – the hidden costs of how business is done. The trouble is, everything you do has a cost, but in the interest of “getting the job done” we tend to only recognize and tally up the higher level descriptions of our work. As in the insurance example, it’s the contingent, hidden stuff that sucks your budget up.
So, here’s my plan for getting a new perspective on what IT does. First, sit down with every IT staff member and get them to explain every task they perform and how long it takes. Then look at those tasks and breakdown the work into all of the subtasks involved. Now, estimate the time required to do all of the subtasks and see if it adds up to the time estimated for the tasks. I’ll bet the majority of the tasks IT does actually take far longer than estimated.
This new perspective on what IT does defines the real size of your glass. The difference between the top of that glass and the level filled by the budget is how oversized your glass is.
Now the challenge: Categorize all your newly analyzed tasks into critical and non-critical, prioritize them within the categories according to whatever criteria make sense (this will probably be some kind of mixture of value and internal politics), and then, using a running total starting from the highest priority critical items and ending with the lowest priority non-critical items, figure out where your budget runs out.
If the end point is in the critical category you’ve got a big problem that is probably going to become a board-level issue. If your budget expires in the non-critical category you now have a good idea of the politics involved and a good argument for making changes.
It’s all about perspective and having a solid analytical basis for figuring out and being able to argue as to whether your glass is half full, half empty or simply too big.
Gibbs has been known to argue in Ventura, Calif. Your contentions to backspin@gibbs.com.
