Hunt for coupons. Increase productivity or efficiencies: I could reduce the amount of time spent on Netflix, or Facebook. Get a Roomba to do my vacuuming. Ask my kids to get a part time job or learn to take the bus or carpool.
I could maximize efficiency by re-jigging family member responsibilities to leverage everyone's skill sets. Increase revenue. I could ask for a raise. Get promoted. Upgrade my skills to make myself more marketable. Change jobs. Draw on my home equity line of credit.
Clean out the garage and sell stuff on Craigslist. Buy lottery tickets. The engine for this analysis is called a business case. Resistance to New Hire Justification Be prepared. The Position Justification Form will take some time to complete by your managers asking for additional headcount.
It requires some calculations and work up front, but is well worth the effort. You will encounter fierce resistance and push back from managers when asked to justify a new position and do the homework, particularly if your small business managers aren't accustomed to robust hiring processes or controls.
Managers may even threaten to quit! Be friendly but firm. Follow through with your request and insist that this be done. Managers are paid to manage, plan, and justify resources. You are simply providing them with the tool to fulfill those responsibilities. A face to face interview is conducted with the hiring manager to present his business case.
This scenario transfers the 'bad cop' label to an external entity. There is little we can do to influence the outcome. However, if benefits are regarded as goals, the attitude toward them is reversed. Most businesses set goals and understand the steps of working to achieve them. A goal is actionable, requiring an approach, a plan, checkpoints, and a commitment to execution.
That plan typically addresses such issues as training, pilot and parallel testing, rollout, and phasing out of existing systems. For projects that are properly justified, it should also list all the benefits identified at the start of the project and present a plan to realize them.
In this way, the IT project manager is not simply a courier, handing over a new or enhanced system, he or she is providing a procedure to help the organization realize the benefits it expected when it started the project. The project manager is an active contributor of value to the company. One of the most popular sources of apparent benefit is savings in employment costs through layoffs, enabled by the conversion to a new technology.
A payback period of just one year is compelling. But is it realistic? There are several reasons that this may not be possible:. The appropriate people are protected by union contracts.
Getting rid of them will be extremely expensive. The company was founded on a policy of employment protection. Hence the payroll cannot actually be reduced. The employees in the affected department are specialists and, while the workload of each will be reduced, the company cannot afford to lose the skills of any of them. The savings in workload do add up to a total of ten people, but they are distributed over a hundred people in such a way that no one or two or ten people end up with no work to perform.
In this example, the savings in workload are effects. In order to be a benefit, there must be a real, dollar, saving. Too many project justifications are based on effects, not benefits. For example, the reduced workload may mean more time for people to complete assignments, resulting in increased quality and ultimately in higher sales.
Or the reduced workload may make it possible to free up resources to improve internal processes or assist sales or solve longstanding irritations, all of which may be quantifiable in dollar terms. And of course, it may be possible to reduce staff and realize cost reductions. In over thirty years of IT experience, I have never seen a project actually result in layoffs.
The point is that an effect does not directly result in financial benefits, but it may enable them through other means. A benefit is real, tangible. Anything else is a collection of buzzwords designed to sell what is probably a marginally justified project. Projects that deliver real benefits do not need a list of intangibles. One of the real ironies behind the focus on intangible benefits is that many of them do produce tangible results.
The Technical Justification section presents guiding questions and accompanying web links point to more information on the individual topics in the actual PST section, not in the image below.
Note that for every relevant use of each setup a PDF file of the Exposure Calculator needs to be uploaded. Since any actual Technical Justification depends strongly on the combination of science goal, the instrument configuration, etc. The example below is for a single case of extragalactic HI observations.
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