Following our White Paper on “How to Build Quickly and Cheaply the System Infrastructure You Need to Execute a Large, Complex Project” [2012-08] we have received numerous questions about how to justify the Return on Investment of such investment.
Will you capture the upside generated by a clever project systems setup?
A new PVD White Paper [2012-19] “The Economic Justification of Proper IT tools to Support a Large, Complex Project” demonstrates that even in the context of a single, stand-alone Large, Complex Project, the Return On Investment is so significant that it is difficult to justify not to implement the right systems – and that actually it would be extremely dangerous not to do it.
In this White Paper we put down some numbers for a mock large project and how much it would cost to setup a minimum IT infrastructure that would respond to its needs. Benefits of appropriate systems are twofold:
- direct improvement of productivity
- indirect performance improvement through accurate dashboard and situation measurement, resulting in lower ‘Cost of Non-Quality’.
All in all, while the systems investment might be of the order of 1 to 1.6M$, the return on investment is at least ten-fold.
Moreover, it would be extremely dangerous to start a Large, Complex Project without a minimum infrastructure: the risk is to lose completely the control of the project. Investing in a minimal IT infrastructure is nowadays necessary and easy to justify.
The romantic days of the lonesome and heroic project managers that could keep a total overview and control of the project on an Excel spreadsheet are gone; they will fade in mythology as the cowboys did. The era of the high-performing structured project team, supported by powerful IT systems to address complexity, has come. Don’t resist – and face inevitable extinction.
Read our new PVD White Paper [2012-19] “The Economic Justification of Proper IT tools to Support a Large, Complex Project”
