Example Business Case Presentation - vBrownBag
Transcript
s. dollar revenue it has seven operating company companies or be used throughout ten US cities the primary business is manufacturing and selling safety and infamy systems for highways so anything from real light cameras to crash cushions to highway barriers is this company's business its value add over its competitors is that it does is own engineering as such these companies have pretty much operated autonomously prior to this proposal the engineering team has come together from the different business units decided that there's much more value in consolidating engineering resources therefore all of the seven be use were no longer operate as independent engineering organizations but single engineering organizations as such the project is going to cost about five million dollars that's a nice chunk of money for a company with 100 million dollars in revenue it just showed I think I wanted to stress how important the project is to the company's perception of its place in the market space IT we're asking for about five hundred thousand of that five million dollar project so a really small amount compared to the overall project the CEO of Acme highway is not exactly warm and fuzzy about this five hundred thousand dollars spin IT in this organization is distributed each business unit similar to the engineering IT is dispersed in each individual business unit my role I'm new to the company I'm coming in saying that you know what this engineering effort is a really important effort but in order to support that I think we need to make an investment in our network and this is my bolt on to this project the CEO has noticed the five hundred grand that's a rather large outlay they don't understand IT I gave the example last week when you know you have to compete against the fork the guy in the manufacturing plant that wants to upgrade forklifts if he wants to upgrade fort lips and I want to upgrade networking the CEO of a manufacturing company is going to understand forklifts versus data center or networking therefore he has some questions and I'm I've broken out my portion of the business case while the overall five million dollar project is then given a tentative greenlight the five hundred thousand is on hold until I can make a case for why I'm requesting five hundred grand so Jason will be playing the role of the CEO of this manufacturing company any questions about the case study before we get started with the role playing I'm on Twitter so you guys can hit me up on the either at the CTO advisor or you can use the V Brown Bag the V Brown Bag hashtag I am watching the stream all right so this is where we're literally starting the slide deck there's not going to be an awful lot of slides I don't especially when I'm presenting to c-level I don't use an awful lot of slides you can get caught up very easily you'll see how I manage kind of the deep detailed questions that Jason tried that Justin will take me through so let's get started Justin thanks for having me over to talk about my project so we obviously see a lot of value in consolidating operations for our engineering group one of the things as I was reviewing the challenges faced by the group well the kind of things that stuck out to me was that as we consolidate groups the ability for these groups to collaborate or is kind of hampered by our current network to give you example we have engineers in California we have engineers in Alabama they need to collaborate on their design fouls which are really large fouls that are hosted in our outsourced data center when these files were in California or separately in Alabama and those teams collaborated on them separately not a big deal but when they need to use our wide area network to access those files there if we go in the way that we're configured today we're gonna have some mighty big challenges when it comes to accessing the those fouls specifically speed you know and locally when they access those files today they open almost instantly when they open the files and our to be state it might take about five or six minutes per file so that's going to I think hamper collaboration the second thing is obviously the there's going to be a need to have collaboration space in between the engineers and remote sites one of the obvious things that we'd like to take care take advantage of is videoconferencing our current Network doesn't support reliable videoconferencing and then the last thing was you know kind of engineering to going from an idea to a manufactured product all of our manufacturing will be located in Alabama so again kind of acting that first challenge where engineers need to collaborate on data on information the same challenge happens with our manufacturing facility where that well those plans and specs needs to get down to the plant and when plant managers x4 changes those changes can delay production of our products so how I propose to solve this solution or how the team proposes to solve the solution we'd like to deploy a new network across all ten Acme locations so basically we're looking to upgrade our network capability you got any basic questions around that yes Oh an example was if you remember a couple of months ago we decided to transfer the fries free product from one business unit to another business unit in that transfer I think it offered a perfect example of the challenge the engineers in California were collaborating with the engineers and our Pennsylvania office they said that they initially sent the files over they actually sent them over by snail mill because our network just wasn't robust enough to send them over so they dropped the they copied the files to a one of those USB big drives dropped it in the mail they the engineers copied it so this took about four or five days to do functionally as we start looking at our engineers working on cost collaboration of fouls where you know we integrate our frees free product with our crash cushion and test data that type of information and knowledge transfer is going to happen much more frequently we are displacing the current network today today's network is what they call a frame relay network technology's been around quite some time it's bit it's quite reliable however the speeds in the connectivity from site to site doesn't meet our needs so what we're going to end up doing is migrating those circuits or services from one provider to another provider it's actually the same provider just a different service so those network assets the what we call the customer premise equipment the equipment that we lease from the vendor all that will be replaced all right so let's go into all right so again just highlighting the proposed solution so we're replacing the existing network which leads your your last question well what we call MPLS just the current generation network basically allows us to communicate from any from one site to another site efficiently in our network today you know we kind of have this hub-and-spoke thing where if if Alabama wanted to communicate with Pennsylvania it had to go through Chicago then from Chicago to our facility down in Alabama and then from our facility in Alabama down up to Pennsylvania the the concept of MPLS allows any organization within our family of companies to communicate directly with each other so much more efficient design so obviously is going to support it's going to solve those bottlenecks we had it's going to support a higher speed file transfer to give you an exam or our sites or experience a six fold increase in data transfer speeds will provide the ability to use desktop conferencing and then one of the side benefits which is not a direct kind of not one of the direct scopes of the project but just one of the side benefits it will enable remote access and remote worker technologies so that challenge that we have where when you go home and you need to access files that were stored in the data center over in Massachusetts and you're at home and there's nothing you can really do about it this technology kind of solves that problem for us that is something that we can't do today all right so one of the things I wanted to talk about first are the risk you know kind of obviously the these are big changes so what are some of the larger risk we do have a larger risk register that talks through some of the smaller risk but I wanted to talk specifically around the things that concern me the most one was the schedule one of the things I've experienced when I've rolled out these similar projects is that the telephone providers are what we sometimes call telcos are notoriously bad for missing scheduled dates while we have in our powerful and our project plan nice and smooth dates one of the things that I've constantly had a problem with is scheduling and having the telephone companies show up having the technology work the first time the right way so there is a risk to the schedule if the telephone companies don't show up on time to deliver our services as expected the schedule may slip and we may not be able to make important dates from a engineering perspective perspective the mitigation for this risk is that we're going to leverage common broadband technology so an example is comcast cable those things can generally be installed within 30 days we'll leverage a VPN technology to create a secure connection over that internet connection while it's high-speed and gives us similar speeds that we will expect an MP in our MPLS network it's not quite as reliable so you know we couldn't reliably have video conferencing calls it's very similar to if you've ever used voice over IP over the internet you know it's like a varnished service some days is great in other days not so much that would be the experience we'd have we'd have to use this mitigation we're actually going to keep those in place those circuits in place as a backup for if our internet connectivity or are those circuits that we're those new circuits that we're installing if those things go down yeah unfortunately we've gone through this round of conversations with the telco vendors before and they we just don't have the size to leverage this I mean that to give you a level of comparison this is almost like a shopping cart type of purchase from the telco there's really not a lot of customization in these deals if we wanted to have a customized deal where we have larger SLS which still wouldn't mitigate the complete financial risk maybe maybe 10% of the risk so some of the risk we're talking about we'd have to be deploying hundreds if not thousands of circuits to get any kind of real leverage that's why it's critical that we get these VPN connections in I'm sorry the short answer is no yes for the engineering portion of it or the engineering consolidation for ador specifically the IT side yeah if you once we actually do not have all the skills needed in health to do to do all of the due diligence and all the design work you'll notice in the one-time costs we are bringing in the CTO advisors to help out with the design and implementation he's done the partner of that consulting firm has done this about six or seven times for companies in our with our similar profile yes we do yes we do it honestly we wouldn't be able to and that's a very good point we need to call that out and now update the rich rester I call that out as a risk there is knowledge transfer in there but as we know knowledge transfer isn't enough to mitigate that risk we and I need to think of a way to validate the success of that knowledge transfer and I'll give that some thought and get back to you appreciate it and then the second thing that I thought about was security I know in the past we haven't exactly been diligent when it came to security our data isn't incredibly sensitive however the you know we have additional concerns with Sox audits we need to close some gaps when it comes to our audit and as well as the modern-day threats are not necessarily at the data but after our resources and as we expand our network we will have more resources and will be a little bit more attempting to some of the network intruders or hackers out there so the mitigation for expanding our risk profile one of the things that the consulting firms were bringing in will be doing would be reviewing individual security policies we're going to create a consolidated Acme highway security policy they'll be distributed throughout to all our employees we're working with HR to perform end-user training on security and the security or awareness and we're going to leverage centralized this is I think something I'm fairly maybe a little overly excited about because I'm a technology helm a lot of our sites actually they either they're their ability to protect their internet access ranges from really robust in our Florida office to non-existent and our Pennsylvania office that's very uneven even we're going to consolidate kind of our internet access have it come through one point and then we'll have a consistent internet access policy throughout the organization which should help mitigate the security risk I agree I think one of the things that our consultants will be doing performing a a complete security assessment of each site so we'll know what our security posture is prior to this effort and then what our target posture will be post the effort but I think well I think I agree with you that I am still a little concerned about our ongoing effort I think I need to get with the team and our advisors and think through not just how do we mitigate this specific risk for this project but the next phase of IT security for our organization or data security for our organization in general yeah I think from a high level we've I've already performed site visits getting to understand you from each individual HR manager on the overall capability of each individual site to perform IT tasks traded a survey of kind of you know high-level overview of of IT operations from a very high level you know what I what things like backup testing backup if there's the D our plan when that D our plan last time that D our plan was executed and just like the Florida versus Pennsylvania security example we're pretty much all over the place when it comes to capability so the I really appreciate you offering the help of HR to do a skills inventory and a gap analysis I think phase two one of the things that the CIO and possibly you should get together and talk about is consolidating operations of IT under one leader I know the the existing model is to let there be autonomy but I imagine that post this project I know you're sponsoring it and will have good response for pushing out these new initiatives but I'm really concerned about operations going forward and if we'll have the political authority to continue to maintain this posture no that's not a that that I can I can help with I'll get a racy out with you now I work with the IT team and part of the gap I think part of this gap analysis that we're gonna do even before we kick off making any changes will expose kind of where we're soft at and there being some type of owner that you can directly ask X questions - okay so from a high level you know this project itself is just a breakout of the larger engineering project so the whole return on investment the NPV was based off of that larger project I made a attempt at breaking out this project specifically so from a simple ro I we're looking at 33 months we are the difference in what we pay our current provider versus what we're paying our future provider in the backup links and software maintenance etc the IBEX differences is about we're we're positive fifteen thousand dollars a month so with a $500,000 easy math look out where we're gonna be whole in about thirty three and a half months the life the useful life of this network is a five is five years and another five years period we'll be looking at doing a similar project so if we use NPV net present value measurement where the project is we're plus about a hundred thousand dollars about twenty percent so it will be a combination of two sold advisory services is the is figuring out I think the from a managerial and executive leadership perspective knowing what we don't know so we're bringing in we're bringing in kind of high-end helped to help with that portion of it the eighty thousand is mainly staff arc so after we've developed a vision and roadmap of how of how we're going to execute the project these are the contractors will actually be performing the work and as part of that is documentation and knowledge transfer that Sal we are doing upfront capital expense and I'm not and I wasn't certain I still have to get with our crl our CFO and understand how we perform how do we charge back the consulting contractor dollars if that if we're going to capitalize that or if that's going to be considered a peck so they'll I didn't do any kind of math for a depreciation so I don't know if the $200,000 in and services will be a depreciable amount or we'll end up eating that all that whole cost the first year so and I think that's the I think that might have been hang up the entire if you notice the if we go back to the NPV there's no spanned the follow-on years because we're looking to wrapping this up in about six months this has to be the project has to be done in timeframe there to realize the business value yeah I wanted to be I wanted to be a little bit I want it to be a little bit aggressive so that you know the I wanted to be a little bit aggressive and go off a high discount rate just to show that the project itself is has a decent return so other things we looked at was doing there's additional technologies such as there's a technique called Citrix actually we use it to access you actually use it to access our Lotus Notes so now you login to Citrix and then you're presented with your Lotus Notes interface and it's a fairly decent experience there's a option in which we could have used potentially Citrix as a solution to the data transfer problem so basically the CAD files and intelligence would exist in the data center in Massachusetts users would connect via Citrix and an access basically AutoCAD and the CAD files remotely we actually ran a pilot the problem that we ran into is that the ability to Citrix just wasn't robust enough for AutoCAD when we put a load of more than five users on a server the experience was sub-optimal and connections kept dropping that was one option another option was if you notice we looked at that if you notice the think I might have had a breakdown here the secondary circuits these backup circuits we're using are significantly cheaper than the primary MPLS circuits that were using by a factor of 10 so we looked at potentially using just the secondary circuits versus getting this MPLS once we once we ran kind of the scenario past our technology advisers they said one of the biggest things that will be challenged with will be consistent experience when it comes to technology we that were counting on to save money and travel which is the video conferencing they just weren't confident that we could that we could but that we could reliably use that type of service and they also talked about skill level when it came to maintaining that we'd have to do that ourselves versus our managed service provider what I do want to keep my eye on this so one of the things that I'm doing is I'm negotiating a 3-year agreement for the primary circuit so if we get it to a point where that technology is a little bit more reliable we have the potential of saving quite a bit of money and just having basically the secondary circuit cost double by two we get to it each location and drop that MPLS circuits and that in three years we potentially save quite a bit of money so those are the two other options we explored great so I think that's everything I had I had a couple of Technology slides in case you were interested but I know that stuff kind of a this one it's one of I roll things that can get get to but did you have any other questions for me I'll get with Jennifer to schedule sometime in the next week or so Thanks all right so that's the end of the roll play we still so we only lost like two or three people and that whole deal anybody have questions on one or feedback on the process and any questions that Justin asked or anything that I any questions on kind of the the angle I took yeah well I haven't been on that side of the table I know I don't think ever so we'll we'll have to switch on the we'll have to switch next time Cole Justin you wanna uh you want to take that one or you you want me to comment that one yeah I've I've personally had projects that have gone horribly bad because we've collectively underestimated the HR portion of the project you know something as simple as and it's not simple but going from Windows XP to Windows 7 so a desktop rolled out there's not a huge difference you know when you're a technologist there's not a huge difference between XP to Windows 7 but I've gotten into like Union disputes over that upgrade the you know we had the hot a this is like a 12,000 user environment with 85 sites and we had to halt the windows 7 upgrade because we didn't consider that end users needed training to go from XP to 7 people who are on the lower end of the knowledge worker scale it's jarring for them to go from using Windows XP because they know exactly where they come in they hit this Start button that that looks a certain way they go to this interface this part of the Start menu and they launch this application and when we change that interface it's a huge huge deal since then you know if this it can be s AP or an Oracle app PeopleSoft it doesn't matter when you change the tools or expectations the technology expectations of a workforce you're going to get some surprising response from the from an HR perspective perspective yeah I think the and I think the I think our I think our friends that the big storage vendor might be feeling the same thing about their max I've used glows knows as frequent as recently as last year so there you go no I I used it as I use it as my primary mail platform for two years so there you go yeah all right so I don't see anything else on the on the feet unless anyone on the thing on the conference call has questions I had a great time this was fun
