Collect Metrics on the Hard, Direct

1
Tutorial 3
DIG FOR VICTORY

• Collect Metrics on the Hard, Direct
• Benefits for the Portal

Hard Benefits are relatively small for a portal
(in most organisations). However, this is all
the more reason to be ruthless in chasing them
down. They may well make or break your case.
Making the Business Case
2
What are Hard Benefits?

• Realisable
• Numbers that you can touch, smell and feel.
  Tyres you can kick. Cherries you can pick.
• Numbers that can be baked into budgets for the
  forthcoming year
• Manpower savings
• Full time equivalents (FTEs) that can be removed
  from next years budget (including agency
  contractor personnel)
• This may be avoided recruitment or actual
  redeployment or redundancy (for the latter, of
  course, the redundancy costs should be included
  in the cost of your project)
• Third party expenditure savings
• Reductions in printing, postage or storage costs
• Reductions in spend with marketing agencies,
  design agencies, web development companies and so
  on.

3
Ideas on where to look (1of4)

• Decommissioning existing Intranets
• Find existing intranet support team(s) analyse
  their headcount budgets web logs. Do an
  inventory of all sites
• Also, look for unofficial sites that reside on
  single servers consider announcing an amnesty
  tell us about a site you have and we will offer
  to migrate it for you for free!
• Work out how much hardware and software costs are
  tied up in these sites. Much of it may be fully
  written-off in your accounts, so use the current
  re-sale value or the cost of replacement as your
  measure
• Decommission existing collaboration solutions
• Do you have loads of stuff sitting on
  (MS-Exchange) public folders? Or in Lotus Notes
  Databases?
• How much people, hardware and software is tied up
  in that?
• What about reports in Business Objects or Crystal
  Reports? Or Focus Reports on your Mainframe?
  How much of this could be better done through a
  portal?

4
Ideas on where to look (2of4)

• Print, postage and distribution costs
• Talk to your purchasing dept to work out the
  current costs of paper, toner cartridges, etc.
  This will be a big number!
• Assume you can make a 10 saving big number!!!
• Work out how much it costs today to have a large
  internal mail storage distribution system.
  Assume 20 saving.
• How do you defend such high assumed savings?
  Well, argument goes like this if you have a
  product price list or expenses policy, everyone
  will print it off, send it around your
  organisation and file the hardcopy locally.
  Every time you update prices or policy, whole
  process starts again.
• With an intranet, you keep it online (where
  everyone can get at it) so no-one ever needs to
  print it off. Plus, if it changes often (like a
  price list) no-one would ever bother to keep a
  hardcopy again.. Hence big and lasting savings!
• Also, the online version becomes a single view
  of the truth so no-one makes the mistake again
  of applying an out-of-date policy or price list
  hence process quality improvements. Put a value
  on that.

5
Ideas on where to look (3of4)

• Manpower savings in processing areas
• If you are putting in an e-expenses app, claim
  you can reduce the current processing team costs
  by 75
• If you are putting in an overtime recording or
  timesheeting system, claim you can reduce the
  team costs by 50
• If you are putting in a room-booking system,
  claim you can remove 100 of the support team
  looking after this
• If you are putting in an e-learning system, claim
  you can close down 50 of your training centres
  and reduce your in-house trainers by 25
• If you are putting in e-Finance solutions (e.g. a
  financial forecasting and budgeting application),
  claim you can cut the finance business support
  team by 10
• If you are putting in e-procurement solutions,
  claim you can save 25 of purchase-to-pay
  processing teams and 10 of professional
  procurement team costs
• If you are putting IT support online, claim you
  can cut 10 of the team costs in Levels 1,2 3
  support

6
Ideas on where to look (4of4)

• Third party expenditure savings
• If you are putting in an e-learning system, claim
  you can reduce expenditure with third party
  trainers by 25
• Claim you can close down completely the current
  employee magazine, with savings in all the
  internal and external costs tied up in it
• Claim you can cancel the press clippings service
  you currently use (as you will have online news
  feeds)
• Cut by 50 the budgets for use of marketing and
  web development agencies to develop future
  intranet sites (or take out 100 if you are also
  deploying a content management solution in your
  portal project)
• Cut 2 from your company-wide stationery budget
  (to allow for less use of flipcharts, pens,
  pencils, rubbers, etc.) Cut a further 3 if you
  plan to deploy whiteboarding or desktop exchange
  technology as part of your portal

7
Conclusions / other thoughts

• Hard benefits are hard to track down
• But should be enough to justify the cost and risk
  of the feasibility phase of your project (firming
  up on the costs and complete benefits to be had)
• As a benchmark, they should comprise at least 15
  of your total benefits or (in my view) your case
  will fail
• Because those who have doubts about realising the
  indirect benefits have nothing direct to hold on
  to
• You collect buy-in along the way
• To get all these benefits grounded, you have to
  work closely with your procurement, finance,
  facilities and HR teams. They are your natural
  allies and should help
• Your first estimate will be cut and cut and cut
  again
• Because no-one likes to have their empire
  challenged and because there are likely to be
  some people in your organisation who wont have
  the portal (e.g. mobile workers). Hence, you
  will still need to retain standing capability in
  processing areas to support those people