What Value is Added for the Price Paid?
Admit to the CEO that you can do a darn good job of it, but the profit center management needs to understand the risks they accept when you do a good job.
They accept that you have not experienced these new PC components, the XP OS, or the brand and flavors of VPN, over your local and regional telecom providers. Each individual component brings its own set of unadvertised problems, and only found by experiencing the problem.
Experiencing the new and unknown problem starts the process of resolution. When individual PC based problems are resolved, you may also need to deal with the problems that arise due to product component incompatibilities. In fact, these are most difficult thus time consuming to discern and resolve. In other words, the number of PCs and locations are obviously physically doable, but your job is more than arms and legs. You want to minimize the disruption and maximize the benefit of the change project.
The $800 pays for additional arms and legs, and that alone decreases the time required to physically install. You will encounter problems (if any) sooner. The value to the organization is realized in the consultants hard won past experience. Someone else paid the price in time. They have actually done this before, encountered and solved the problems (you verify this) and this knowledge along with their experience along the lines of expected future problems can be passed onto you to benefit the company.
If your problem resolution cycle on one issue takes 8 hours, can the profit centers afford the associated costs? You will not know how many issues will arise until implementation starts. You know that you can resolve all problems given time. There is no way for you to know how much time, but with everyone?s patience, we will meet the objective. If the management objective limits the implementation period (the time) then lets allocate the $800 to that time constraint so that particular objective is not at risk.
Thus, your time is spent on managing, learning, and teaching, and all the other aspects that this change brings to light.
By the way, will at least one of the consultants be there for at least one full work day following physical implementation? Have the users been trained-introduced to the new OS and desktop? Do they know who to call, and what tests they need to perform and when they are scheduled to do the tests (can also be a training exercise)? Have you recruited from the different groups and locations persons to serve as the key contacts? Will the consultants include a two-week administrator contact serving as your phone support?
It goes to time and quality. What if we never use it and all goes very smoothly? Remember Y2K went smoothly for most of IT due to the efforts before 2000. When little or nothing failed at or after Y2K then there was strange disappointment, people asking did we spend more than we should have? Well, that is an odd response to meeting an objective. Perhaps if those that ask that type of question would care to test their aversion to risk they can remove the spare tire from the auto for a week. If they are not willing to do that then how can they rationalize risking the source of their income? $800 is analogous to the paying the cost of the small funny looking spare tire. I never thought about asking for removal before punching to save on costs. Nor do I remove my spare to create an odd risk aversion thrill.
If they see no problem and assume the responsibility that they can tolerate the risk aversion thrill then by all means do save the $800 to cover the spilled drinks at the office holiday party.
Please notice that any dollar amount can be plugged into this discussion to match the scale of any organization. Business is business, even the big boys will occasionally make poor decisions. But, it is your job to let advise them so that we can look back as we proceed down the decision path.
