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No A-S-K, No G-E-T

Are you one of those IT Directors that gives up too easily? For example, you complete and submit your budget request, then watch as management deems something else in another department to be more important. You give up gracefully and accept the outcome. That might be a big mistake. Here’s the best practice for what you should do instead.

By Ellen Koskinen-Dodgson

Ellen Koskinen-Dodgson is President and Managing Partner of TMC IT and Telecom Consulting Inc. She is an IT and Telecommunications Management Consultant, electrical engineer, author, speaker, media resource and Expert Witness.

The Budget Process

Every year, you go through a process to decide what changes are needed to your IT estate - upgrading, replacement or net new purchases.

  1. Network upgrades may be needed to redesign the network, to improve cyber-security, or to eliminate congestion.
  2. Server refresh can be driven by the age of your servers—either to meet your evergreen policy, because they have aged out of manufacturer’s support, or because of performance problems.
  3. Cybersecurity spending can be based on a newly adopted cybersecurity program, routine penetration testing, age-related equipment upgrades or...
  4. Extra IT staff may be needed to meet workload requirements.
  5. Consultant assistance may be needed for IT assessments, strategy development or project management.
  6. Training is often underfunded so careful wording is important for IT staff training as well as end-user training in areas such as disaster recovery tabletop exercises or cyber-security awareness.

The Real Cost

Your budget request list is likely backed up by a business case analysis for each initiative, where you’ve calculated the total cost of implementing a change and compared it to the cost of the maintaining the status quo. The costs of change might include cost reductions through reduced staffing such as with customer self serve options.

Review Implications

It’s important that your business case looks at links between projects so that it is clear what depends on what, as well as what the cost to the business is of not doing a project. Sometimes it might be increased maintenance costs, sometimes it’s an increased risk exposure. If one project requires one or more other projects in order to work then it is your job to make that clear in the original case.

Report back to senior management to ensure that they understand the implications, not just the cost, of deferring any of your budget items. For more, see Peter’s article, The Cost of Not Doing a Project.

Self-Suppression

When we’re first hired with a new client, we often find that their IT management have gotten into a habit of self- suppression. That is, they have trained themselves to ignore what they need and only ask for what they think that they might be able to sell.

With one client, things had gotten so bad that we were told by management when they hired us to complete an IT Assessment, that they had lost faith in their IT department to tell them the truth about the problems they were facing. Based on our recommendations, they needed to provided a one-time catchup fund equivalent to 50% of their normal budget.

If you’d like to explore these ideas further or comment on this article, contact me at .

This article was published in the February 2023 edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:10 Issue:2

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