In the technology business, it’s often difficult to quantify for our customers what the overall benefit of a technology installation might be. As an accountant by training, this can be particularly frustrating, especially when a customer is looking at spending a great deal of money on a project. So called “soft” benefits (competitive positioning, better customer service, time to market etc.) are fine in a strong, booming economy and many customers decide based on these factors. But when times get tighter, as they appear to be getting again, customers will want a much clearer quantification of the Return On Investment (ROI) for their technology spend.
To this end, we conducted a study for a large financial institution about what the overall benefit of their proposed Enterprise Project Management (EPM) suite would be. Working with all of their project management personnel, we were able to identify efficiency gains (real $ savings) and schedule gains that could be realized in their organization. The gains were broken down into categories:
Project Planning and Delivery
Project Status Reporting
Time Entry
Approvals
Resource Planning
Our customer was able to identify significant, real “hard dollar” savings and build a very compelling ROI case to take forward to their management.
We were able to to take that experience and build a whitepaper that highlights the potentials areas of benefit in order for other customers to build their own ROI case. The whitepaper is at:
http://www.agorainc.com/services/epm/The_Business_Case_for_a_PPM_platform.pdf