Is your enterprise IT infrastructure becoming too costly? Reducing the cost of your IT pie can be a challenge, especially when you want to ensure you can still maintain the same level of productivity and service. Before you begin cutting the budget, you may want to take a look at which areas in your IT pie require more or less in terms of funding and resources.
Understanding the Divisions of Your IT Pie
The enterprise IT pie is made up of three slices:
1. Engineering
2. Management
3. Governance
Engineering ensures installations are running as they should. Management manages and maintains the resources your business needs to grow and be more efficient. Governance ensures that everything is working as expected.
These three slices work to guarantee the health of your IT ecosystem. However, when one piece of the pie is taking too much funding or sucking up too many resources, that area can become over-budgeted. Each division of the IT pie has to work together to achieve equilibrium.
Keeping the Divisions Divided
There are aspects of your organizational IT structure that could be costing you money while not adding value to either the IT department or the enterprise. When engineers are pulled into management activities– especially at random– their focus is disrupted and their projects are delayed. Likewise, when management or governance positions need to respond to engineering issues, they may struggle with systems not entirely familiar to them. Interruptions and boundary-crossing between divisions will impact the cadence of the projects, ultimately leading to a lesser quality of work.
Ultimately, this leads to costly issues and problems, such as work having to be redone. By enforcing the boundaries between divisions and ensuring engineers can work unhindered, you can reduce the cost of your IT pie through efficiency improvements rather than direct budget reduction.
Reducing Cost by Increasing Project Effectiveness
Seventy-five percent of IT projects fail to meet budget, schedule, and scope. A significant amount of these failures are due to issues with distractions and shifting responsibilities. When IT engineers are kept on task, they can facilitate more successful projects that cost the overall organization less to implement.
When IT engineers are constantly being pulled into the other two corners of the IT pie, they find themselves unable to meet their desired quality of work. If this happens too frequently, you begin losing engineers who quit to pursue work in a more-focused position, leaving the IT department with the burden of replacing them.
Improving Upon Engineer and Staff Retention
The cost of acquiring talented, professional engineers is far greater than any perceived cost-savings regarding multi-tasking. Replacing engineers in the middle of the project can be substantially harmful to the project and the company's budget. Not only does the new engineer have to undergo the standard processes of training, but they also need to catch up on a project they have not been part of from the beginning. Hiring new employees tends to be a costly experience overall, and it's one that can be circumvented by improving upon engineer satisfaction and avoiding over-stressing.
If you want to reduce the cost of your IT pie, you usually don't need to go as far as budget slashing. Instead, look at areas under which the pie is intermingling and boundaries are being disrupted. By keeping your engineers focused and on task, you can both increase the overall efficiency of your IT department and reduce the unnecessary costs related to staff replacement.
