HOW to avoid 5 career killing ROI mistakes
Rebecca Waterman wrote an article in CIO Magazine a little while back that I was reminded of when talking to customers about building a business case for IT. She highlighted 5 mistakes to avoid to remove effort and improve accuracy in developing your ROI for IT projects.
She talked about 5 mistakes that LINQ eradicates.
- Death by Spreadsheet
- Seeking the Perfect ROI
- Ignoring internal personnel costs
- Double counting benefits
- Thinking you’re finished
Death by spreadsheet
LINQ eliminates that need for a spreadsheet when comparing your current v future costs. It accounts for the cost of People, Systems they’re using, the Actions they take and places a value on the Information that fuels your processes.
Insight dashboards provide side by side comparisons or current and future models, showing; Systems, People, Actions and information that are unique to each version, and
Provides a summary of the change to both costs and time
Seeking the perfect ROI
Developing the perfect ROI can draw the attention away from the big “rocks” in your transformation project. The best results don’t always come from the places you would normally find your payback.
LINQ allows you to visualise the cost and benefits that are going to provide the most value.
Having identified them, you can then select the area of greatest focus and instantly get information on the Systems, People and Actions that are going to impacted.
In this simple example you can see a current state scenario where four key organisation outcomes are reliant on personnel memory. This won’t show up in any normal ROI calculator.
Ignoring internal personnel costs
Capturing the cost of change is an important element to consider when determining your ROI.
Often internal costs are not considered.
LINQ offers a built in IT Transformation calculator to determine your cost of change
Double counting benefits
When developing your ROI, it’s often tempting to include soft benefits alongside the clear cost savings.
LINQ’s ability to map the flow of information through your business, shows you areas of tangible productivity gain.
Productivity gains that can then be modeled to show increases in throughput or sales activity for example.
Thinking you're finished
Don’t file you’re ROI calculations away when your project gets started. Your project is never going to return exactly what you have estimated, and will never be delivered exactly as designed.
Your ROI calculation needs to become a living document that gets updated throughout, and even after the project is completed.
LINQ allows you to work live in your system, checking assumptions as new information comes along, and providing a roadmap for future transformation.
LINQ sketches can also be shared for viewing, or for collaboration