I wanted to focus and talk about a specific scenario that played out in my last company.
Let me set the stage- I worked for a wire and cable manufacturing company that has been around for about 60 years. I was hired as an Application/Systems Analyst which meant that they wanted me to be involved in all things IT. The team was me, a DB admin and my boss who was the Applications/IT Manager. During my time here there wasn’t a huge focus on the IT budget or IT in general. We recently had upgraded our ERP(Enterprise Resource and Planning) system and this caused a major setback in terms of the IT and Operations budget that I believe led upper management to stray away from large projects or even small projects. For example, we had a lot machines still running on Windows XP, the windows servers that we had were 2008R2 and 2003 and were in need of upgrading. Many of the machines were running on trial/unregistered Windows licenses – it was just a mess.
Little by little, me and my boss were trying to legitimize and upgrade our servers and were even beginning to make a proposal to make a move to Office365 due to our on-prem email server crashing on us at least 2 times a month. At the same time, little by little, I started to realize how much of the cost control focus was not on our IT infrastructure. The focus was almost 100% on production and reduction of scrap from production, etc. I gathered this from talks I had with the cost accountant and the financial analysts that shared the offices with me. There seem be nobody in upper management that wanted to put focus on the IT infrastructure.
This started to change when my boss and I started getting more involved in the planning of projects and letting the executives know what the risks were of continuing to kick the bottle down the road when it came to IT. We got some help from the constant application and system failures that we had throughout the weeks and it got to the point were our IT budget was not enough to handle patching up ongoing issues.
We came up with and formed an IT steering committee that brought people together from all divisions to focus on IT issues and the future of IT for the company. The more and more we started to understand about proper project/cost/budget management, the easier it was to get people in on our projects.
In the book section 15.1(Understanding Control), there’s a good section at the very beginning that mentions the requirements for an effective control system in order to hit target objectives:
My boss and I took most, if not all of these steps during our IT steering meetings in order to push our projects. In about 6 months we had upgraded to Office365, re-licensed most of our windows environment and had lots of other projects passed through.
Proper cost control/focus is essential in the success of not just projects, but also the whole company.
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