Its obviously never recommended for any organisation to be racking up unnecessary costs, but following an economic downturn there’s increased pressure to minimise costs and maximise efficiency.
For several companies in the private sector the name of the overall game is becoming survival, and the general public sector has come under ever increasing budgetary pressures. Organisations in both sectors face exactly the same conundrum, how to reduce costs without adversely impacting front line services, indeed many might have to simultaneously improve services.
What’s promising is these requirements do not need to be mutually incompatible, my business has a number of case studies in both private sector and local government where we have significantly saved on running costs in the length of improving internal and customer services.
Just what exactly type of opportunities do organisations have to achieve this? You will find a number of key areas just within ICT and the management of projects that generally have the capacity to yield savings via a more structured and controlled approach.
Many organisations lack a coherent ICT strategy, unless your strategy is welded to the broader organisational vision, you is going to be wasting money on perhaps interesting, but ultimately non strategic ICT activities. An average ICT department has many internal and external pressures. Without clear direction, staff are apt to be spending a lot of time doing the wrong things at the wrong time in terms of the corporate priorities. This wastes a bundle!
A strong ICT strategy can provide a definite road map of what needs doing, and make certain that the right priorities are increasingly being addressed all the time to progress the corporate plans.
ICT infrastructure also generally offers significant opportunity to reduce costs and at the same time frame improve the service to users. ICT systems and infrastructure tend to be implemented on a task by project basis that is an obsolete approach and highly inefficient. Modern commodity technology provides for widespread sharing of ICT resources, Today’s technology such as for instance’virtualisation’techniques can reduce how big server estates dramatically.
This could reduce costs significantly. Using commodity technology reduces the first capital investment, higher utilisation of resources reduces the requirement for infrastructure and you will find subsequent savings from spiralling energy budgets and datacentre space costs.
Projects which fail to progress in a reasonable fashion, or become stuck, cost a fortune in management time and can cause reputation damage. Regardless of this poor practice continues to be common place in both the Public and Private sectors.A project that is not tightly defined and containing clear project objectives has a good possibility of failing. It is very important setting success criteria from the beginning, indicators are essential showing perhaps the project has achieved what it should have done.
A standard method of implementing a task methodology is to test and adopt an existing and proven framework such as for instance Prince 2. This is a good start, but such frameworks could be cumbersome and difficult to utilize, all environments have their own cultural and structural complexities to consider. The method by which you apply the framework and associated behaviours are what makes the largest difference.
Good governance is important, as is a strong but flexible framework that’s adhered to by all project participants. It can also be vital to utilize a Project risk management process from the outset, this will reduce costs and raise the likelihood of project success.
These are just a couple examples. As organisations grow inefficiencies easily creep in, regular review and assessment are essential if this is to be minimised. Very often reveal SWOT analysis can provide multiple cost reduction opportunities that have been previously not apparent.