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How to differentiate NEED vs. WANT??

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by notsochiguy 1 view

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Hello all:

I wanted to get some feedback on an issue at my place of employment that is quickly becoming political (went from a small brushfire to now involving the SR. VP of HR, the CFO and the CIO).

What has happened is that a team (of which I am a part) was created to evaluate the validity of requests for new PCs (both desktops and laptops). Most of the time, it is pretty cut and dry. Sometimes, we need to probe further to determine if it is a WANT request as opposed to a NEED request (i.e. employee wants a laptop, but could really get by with a desktop).

Without going over the entire specifics of the situation, I wanted to ask all of you: when determining what hardware to purchase for an employee (specifically, PCs), what criteria do you use to assign the appropriate hardware?

Any helpful comments would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!!

P.S. Some further details may prove helpful, to put things into context:

We have about 14 core sites located within a 50 mile radius.

In the instance that created the mess, the employee travels to the sites an average of 2-3 days per month, and does not go out of town for any business purposes.

Our 'standard' desktop costs about $1400, and our laptops come in at about $2800. We are not-for-profit, so money does play a role in determinations.

Working from home/flex scheduling is encouraged/supported by the employee's manager (and his manager), but is not really supported/encouraged on the whole within the organization (and definitely not by the people that ultimately control the $$$)

This employee is on a team that has another 7 people doing the same exact job. Whatever hardware she gets will directly impact what those 7 others get (8, when you count her manager) within the next couple of months.

10 replies

by jamesrl

I work in a software company and we use much less expensive computers.

But back when computers were more expensive, the solution we used was this - buy a departmental laptop. Make people sign it out in advance if they want to take iot to another site or work from home, or on the weekend etc.

That way every employee has access on occasion and you won't need 7 of them.

James

by big ole jack

Now instead of having 7 separate desktops with people's personal junk cluttering the hard drives, you have a single laptop with a cluttered hard drive that will fill up much quicker and require more frequent maintenance to keep from getting fragmented or full.

by charliespencer

Get a single loaner laptop and get a hard drive for each of them. I suspect not all eight will be interested in using the laptop, so you may only need a few drives.

James is right, you're paying way too much for hardware. The price you're paying for desktops is what I pay for laptops, even with docks, operating systems, etc. Are you buying these units retail? Talk directly to the manufacturer / vendor and be sure to mention you're a non-profit.

As to who gets a laptop, we have a few criteria. Do they travel more than once a month? If they're regularly working overtime in the office, would they prefer working at home? Do they move from one meeting to the next, spending less than half the day in their own office?

Still, the price you're paying should probably be a bigger corporate concern.

by jamesrl

for borrowing the laptop was that they remove their files afterwards.

We also ghosted them, and if any users reported problems we just re-imaged them.

It helps that everyone had space on a network drive. So they could put the files they wanted on the network drive and work from there.

James

by naughtymonkey

keep them from doing their job. If not, they don't need it. You can always look at productivity gains, but in your situation it should be can they do their job.

Also as James said, those are expensive. I too work at a software company and our laptops cost $1200 and desktops cost $600 without monitor. These are all dual core with at least 2 GB of RAM.

by notsochiguy

Thanks to you all who have posted so far.

I, too, think the costs of the PCs are high. They do include the cost of monitors (17" LCD is standard), docking stations (for the laptops) and the software licensing (Office Pro, Symantec NAV & Ghost, LANDesk, etc). That said, we have about 25,000 or so employees, and guarantee we don't leverage the buying power the way we ought to be.

However, that is a ball out of my court. I've made suggestions to various upper-ups that we may want to visit that sometime...but that is about all I can do on that one.

Again, thanks for the posts so far!

by wayne m.

Determine what your department budget for lap tops is. Buy what your budget will allow. Leave it up to the direct line managers to determine who gets and who loses the scarce resource.

Your department responsibility should be no more than to say, "We have XX lap tops. You figure out who should get them."

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