Just a quick note to mention that I’m off travelling again, this time swapping 39 degree Celsius summer weather of Perth for somewhere between –6 to 5 degrees of Canada. I’ll be spending a week in Canada running two classes – one public and one private. The first class is a public SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class running in Vancouver. MVP Michal Pisarek of SharePointAnalystHQ fame will be there and it should be a terrific two days of learning how to think a little differently to govern SharePoint strategy and deployment. You will learn a bunch of new skills, techniques and perspectives. Best of all, the skills learnt are applicable for many other types of complex projects.

The class flyer is here: http://www.sevensigma.com.au/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/02/SPIA.pdf

The registration site is here: http://spiavancouver.eventbrite.com/

In terms of course coverage and content it is worth noting the research performed by the Eventful group (who run the Share conferences). According to them, the hot topic areas for SharePoint are governance, user adoption, change management, information architecture and user empowerment. These sort of topics are the sort where plenty of people tell you what the issues are, but are typically lighter on what to do about them. This class covers why this is, as well as dealing with all of these areas and presents detailed strategies, tools and methods to address them. Furthermore, aside from the 500+ page manual of meaty governance goodness, as a take home, we supply a CD for attendees with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator and sample mind maps of Information Architecture.

At last count there were 5 places left for the Vancouver class, so if you have been pondering if it is a worthwhile class, check out some of the feedback from the class web site. Also, if you know anybody who might be interested in attending, please pass the course flyer and registration site details to them. We always end up with people who tell us “Ah – if only I knew about the class!!”

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

                      

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Over the last three years, my career trajectory had altered somewhat where I spent half my time as a SharePoint practitioner, doing all of the things that us SharePoint practitioners do, and the other half was spent in a role that I would call sensemaking. Essentially group facilitation work, on some highly complex, non IT problems. These ranged from areas such as city planning, (envisioning and community engagement) to infrastructure delivery (think freeways, schools and hospitals), to mental health, team and relationship building, performance management, board meetings and various other scenarios.

Imagine how much of a different world this is, where a group is coming together from often very different backgrounds and base positions, to come to grips with a complex set of interlocking problems and somehow try and align enough to move forward. We cannot simply throw a “SharePoint” at these problems and think it will all be better. By their very nature, we have to collaborate on them to move forward – true collaboration in all its messy, sometimes frustrating glory.

As a result of this experience, I’ve also learned many highly effective collaborative techniques and approaches that I have never seen used in my 20+ years of being an IT practitioner. Additionally, I’ve had the opportunity to work with (and still do), some highly skilled people who I learned a huge amount from. This is “standing on the shoulders of giants” stuff. As you can imagine, this new learning has had a significant effect on how Seven Sigma now diagnoses and approaches SharePoint projects and has altered the lens through which I view problem solving with SharePoint.

It also provided me the means to pinpoint a giant blind spot in the SharePoint governance material that’s out there, and what to do about it.

The first catalyst – back injury

In January this year, my family and I went on a short holiday, down to the wine country of Western Australia called the Margaret River region. On the very first day of that trip, I was at the beach, watching my kids run amok, when I totally put my back out (*sigh* such an old man). Needless to say, I could barely move for the next week or two after. My family, ever concerned for my welfare, promptly left me behind at the chalet and took off each day to sample wines, food and generally do the things that tourists do.

Left to my own devices, and not overly mobile I had little to do but ponder – and ponder I did (even more than my usual pondering – so this was an Olympic class ponder). Reflecting on all of my learning and experiences from sensemaking work, my use of it within SharePoint projects, as well as the subsequent voracious reading in a variety of topics, I came to realise that SharePoint governance is looked through a lens that clouds some of the most critical success factors. I knew exactly how to lift that fog, and had a vision for a holistic view of SharePoint governance that at the same time, simplifies it and makes it easy for people to collectively understand.

So I set to work, distilling all of this learning and experience and put it into something coherent, rigorous and accessible. After all, SharePoint is a tool that is an enabler for “improved collaboration”, and I had spent half of my time on deeply collaborative non IT scenarios where to my knowledge, no other SharePoint practitioner has done so. Since sensemaking lies in all that ‘softer’ stuff that traditionally IT is a bit weaker on, I thought I could add some dimensions to SharePoint governance in a way that could be made accessible, practical and useful.

By the end of that week I still had a sore back, but I had the core of what I wanted to do worked out, and I knew that it would be a rather large undertaking to finish it (if it ever could be finished).

The second catalyst – Beyond Best Practices

I also commenced writing a non SharePoint book on this topic area with Kailash Awati from the Eight to Late blog, called Beyond Best Practices. This book examines why most best practices don’t work and what can be done about them. The plethora of tools, systems and best practices that are generally used to tackle organisational problems rarely help and when people apply these methods, they often end up solving the wrong problem. After all, if best practices were best, then we would all follow them and projects would be delivered on time, on budget and with deliriously happy stakeholders right?

The work and research that has gone into this book has been significant. We studied the work of many people who have recognised and written about this, as well as many case studies. The problem these authors had is that these works challenged many widely accepted views, patterns and practices of various managerial disciplines. As a result these ideas have been rejected, ignored or considered outright heretical, and thus languish (largely unread) in journals. The recent emergence of anything x2.0 and a renewed focus on collaboration might seem radical or new for some, but these early authors were espousing very similar things many years ago.

The third catalyst – 3grow

Some time later in the year, 3grow asked me to develop a 4 day SharePoint 2010 Governance and Information Architecture course for Microsoft NZ’s Elite program. I agreed and used my “core” material, as well as some Beyond Best Practice ideas to develop the course. Information Architecture is a bloody tough course to write. It would be easy to cheat and just do a feature dump of every building block that SharePoint has to offer and call that Information Architecture. But that’s the science and not the art – and the science is easy to write about. From my experience, IA is not that much different to the sensemaking work that I do, so I had a very different foundation to base the entire course from.

The IA course took 450 man hours to write and produced an 800 page manual (and just about killed me in the process), but the feedback from attendees surpassed all expectations.  This motivated me to complete the vision I originally had for a better approach to SharePoint governance and this has now been completed as well (with another 200 pages and a CD full of samples and other goodies).

The result

I have distilled all of this work into a master class format, which ranges from 1 to 5 days, suited to Business Analysts, Project and Program Managers, Enterprise and Information Architects, IT Managers and those in strategic roles who have to bridge the gap between organisational aspirations and the effective delivery of SharePoint solutions. I speak the way I write, so if the cleverworkarounds writing style works for you, then you will probably enjoy the manner in which the material is presented. I like rigour, but I also like to keep people awake!

One of my pet hates is when the course manual is just a printout of the slide deck with space for notes. In this master class, the manual is a book in itself and covers additional topic areas in a deeper level of detail from the class. So you will have some nice bedtime reading after attending.

Andrew Woodward has been a long time collaborator on this work, before we formalised this collaboration with the SamePage Alliance, we had discussed running a master class session in the UK on this material. At the same time, thanks to Michael Sampson, an opportunity arose to conduct a workshop in Ireland. As a result, you have an opportunity to be a part of these events.

Dublin

The first event is terrific as it is a free event in Dublin on November 17, hosted by Storm Technology a Microsoft Gold Partner in Dublin. As a result of the event being free, it is by invitation only and numbers are limited. This is a one day event, focussing on the SharePoint Governance blind spots and what to do about them, but also wicked problems and Dialogue Mapping, as well as learning to look at SharePoint from outside the IT lens, and translate its benefits to a wider audience (ie “Learn to speak to your CFO”).

So if you are interested in learning how to view SharePoint governance in a new light, and are tired of the governance material that rehashes the same tired old approaches that give you a mountain of work to do that still doesn’t change results, then register your interest with Rosemary at the email address in the image above ASAP and she can reserve a spot for you. We will supply a 200 page manual, as well as a CD of sample material for attendees, including a detailed governance plan.

London

In London on November 22 and 23, I will be running a two day master class along side Andrew Woodward on SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture. The first day is similar to the Ireland event, where we focus on governance holistically, shattering a few misconceptions and seeing things in a different light, before switching focus to various facets of Information Architecture for SharePoint. In essence, I have taken the detail of the 4 days of the New Zealand Elite course and created a single day version (no mean feat by the way).

Participants on this course will receive a 400 page manual, chock full of SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture goodness, as well as a CD/USB of sample material such as a SharePoint governance plan, as well as IA maps of various types. Unlike Ireland, this is an open event, available to anyone, and you can find more detail and register at the eventbrite site http://spiamasterclass.eventbrite.com/. In case you are wondering, this event is non technical. Whether you have little hands on experience with SharePoint or a deep knowledge, you will find a lot of value in this event for the very reason that the blind spots I focus on are kind of universally applicable irrespective of your role.

Much of what you will learn is applicable for many projects, beyond SharePoint and you will come away with a slew of new approaches to handle complex projects in general.

So if you are in the UK or somewhere in Europe, look us up. It will be a unique event, and Andrew and I are very much looking forward to seeing you there!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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Hot off the press (okay – well SlideShare magic),  I’ve just posted by Best Practices Conference slide deck for the "speak to your CFO" session, along with the ROI spreadsheet for the PMIS scenario that I used during the demonstration. Like the "wicked problems" slide deck, slideshare conversion isn’t quite there, so just contact me if you want a pptx version.

…and the spreadsheet. Just remember you scary MBA and finance types. I *know* this is a simple sheet and you can pick all sorts of holes in it. It is really for training and guidance purposes only. (Therefore see the obligatory "don’t come crying to me if this gets you into trouble" disclaimer below).

THIS CODE IS PROVIDED UNDER THIS LICENSE ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES THAT THE COVERED CODE IS FREE OF DEFECTS, MERCHANTABLE, FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR NON-INFRINGING. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE COVERED CODE IS WITH YOU. SHOULD ANY COVERED CODE PROVE DEFECTIVE IN ANY RESPECT, YOU (NOT THE INITIAL DEVELOPER OR ANY OTHER CONTRIBUTOR) ASSUME THE COST OF ANY NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. THIS DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY CONSTITUTES AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THIS LICENSE. NO USE OF ANY COVERED CODE IS AUTHORIZED HEREUNDER EXCEPT UNDER THIS DISCLAIMER

Use at your own risk!

                      

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I have been extremely quiet on the blogging front lately, because I have been extremely busy, splitting my time between working on my two presentations for the up-coming Best Practices SharePoint Conference, as well as wearing my undies on the outside (ala superman), deep in the bowels of some unhealthy SharePoint farms, nailing various technical and governance issues and helping organisations regain some lost assurance. On top of that, I’ve also been doing a lot of non IT related work in a group facilitation discipline.

I thought it’s about time I emerged from this big mushroom I find myself under to let you know more about what I will be speaking about, as well as some of the other speakers and topics that I really looking forward to. Seriously, we are in the company of giants with this conference. The caliber and quality of the speakers has me wondering what the hell I am doing there!

I mean we have all the "A list" big kids of the SharePoint world there. Gary Lapointe is a freakin’ bona fide superstar! – via his STSADM extensions, he has saved the asses of more SharePoint admins and developers than even Joel has. Robert Bogue is an even better all-rounder than Andrew Symonds (sorry non cricketing countries you won’t get that analogy) and touches on a wider variety of topics than anyone else I have ever come across. Then there the likes of Andrew Woodward, Ben Curry, Bob Mixon, Eric Shupps, fellow metalhead Mike Watson, Ruven Gotz and Todd Bleeker just to name a few!

Somehow I have to squeeze in a beer with all of them yet stay sober enough to present. That’s a tough ask!

Anyway, both of my sessions are in the CIO stream and I think are rather topical given the current financial crisis crap that is happening around the world.

My first session is called "How to avoid SharePoint becoming a wicked problem". This is a pet topic of mine – something that I have spent a lot of time on, and developing new skills in (hence the aforementioned facilitation work). For the record, I didn’t make up the term "wicked problem" – its been a subject of academic research since the term was first coined in the early 1970′s. This session is going to cover a lot of what I have learned on this topic including how to spot SharePoint wickedness early, recognise it for what it is, and apply the *right* sort of tools and techniques to mitigate it.

I do worry that people will find some of my stuff a little too left field, but I do have the results to attest to the value and power of these techniques and I am really looking forward to sharing my methods and comparing with what has worked for other presenters and attendees.

The second topic is on the topic of good old SharePoint Return on Investment (ROI). I’m one of these people that believe most things can be measured or quantified. I’ve always wanted to return to my series on "How to Speak to your CFO" and continue down that road. Given we have entered once in a lifetime era of falling profit, plummeting asset prices, reduced budgets, costlier finance and great uncertainty, my quest for bringing a lasting peace to the cold war between managers and geeks moves to San Diego

My aim for this session is to allow non SharePoint people to understand where some of the hidden costs are SharePoint, as well as show SharePoint people the basic financial tools for ROI modelling and secondly, I will explain how to build an ROI decision model and provide a scenario that we will try out some different assumptions with.

As for the rest of the veritable *buffet* of topics – where do you start? First up, I am torn between Bill’s "Aligning your Information and Findability Architectures using SharePoint Server 2007 Technologies" and Yoda Bogue’s "Selling Governance in your Organization". If I go to Bill’s session, then I’ll definitely be attending Robert’s Governing Development in SharePoint session.

In the afternoon, it gets even harder! You have "Transform the My Site into an Information Hub" by Mark Eichenberger, Bob Mixon’s "Learn why Taxonomies are the Most Important Part of any Document or Information Asset Management System, How to Facilitate the Government out of Governance by Virgin Carrol and Nuts and Bolts Governance- Practical Application of the Concepts

.. and that’s just day one!

Seriously people, no matter that sort of SharePoint sub disciplines push your buttons, you are going to get extreme value for money here. You will come away with an amazing amount of material that will result in real and tangible cost savings across various areas of the SharePoint realm.

If you live in California or anywhere in the US – there is no excuse If *I* have to spend 25+ hours cooped up in  plane just to get there and survive the jet-lag to present, then you should come on down and join the fun.

Hope to see you there!

Paul Culmsee

                      

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To recap, the first article introduced the financial concept of discount cash flow, net present value and internal rate of return. Next, we discussed how I came up with the three scenarios and the assumptions and methodology behind valuing the scenarios, which placed a specific emphasis on costing the holistic view of governance. The last two articles, here and here, covered the first two scenarios, where we showed the circumstances where the project had a good outcome, and a not so good outcome.

So, for the last time around, we are going to take on a difficult SharePoint scenario. This is the scenario where SharePoint is used as the platform to build a custom web application.

Please Note: This is a very, very simplistic scenario and is in no way comprehensive. It is designed purely as a guide only! Please do not take it as gospel! Make sure you read my assumptions!

The approach we will take for this one is a little different. Instead of simply doing a cashflow based around costs versus benefits of the project as a whole, lets assume the project will go ahead. So instead we will use the DCF technique to try and work out if it is worthwhile using SharePoint as the platform, versus plain old vanilla ASP.NET.

Once again, if finance is not your forte, then load up on a redbull, and I will try and keep it entertaining by insulting developers and architects and product/platform ‘fanboys’ as much as humanly possible.

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating:    

The problem

This time around we will essentially use the same scenario as the previous one. Our 1000 staff company who manufactures variety of sophisticated devices and appliances is struggling with technical support costs related to after sales service and advice.

In the last scenario, the public web site was blamed. But the resident redbull guzzling “It’s free so it has to be good!” scary LAMP administrator, who’s still living with mom, feels miffed about this and claims that this is a symptom, not the cause. Instead, he shifts the blame on the computer illiterate, suit-wearing, day trading business development staff for trying to be all things to all people. The BDM’s put down the magazine they have been reading all morning and claim that the engineering people, who appear to speak English, although no-one is quite sure, are building products that are ‘too engineered’, and you have to be Einstein to use them.

So, who’s really at fault? (Well if you ask me I always default to the sales staff but in my example, I am going to say none of the above!)

So, it seems clear that we need to look at this problem from a more fundamental perspective (and you are about to find out what those ‘quality manager’ dudes do all day). Our company has an obvious problem with customer satisfaction. Our market share is stagnant, our web site sucks, staff have low morale and the good ones are leaving. Staff will blame ‘management’, and at the end of the day they are accountable, but this is deeper than just the web site or ‘management’. It results from a problem with holistic internal quality management.

The business drivers

Right now the company is not formally tracking and measuring customer data, and therefore it isn’t fed back into the various areas of the business (R&D, Sales, Support, Finance, etc) to better co-ordinate with each-other as well as improve their internal processes and systems to optimise the customer’s requirements.

Result?

• The IT geeks are pushing their favourite platform (“We should be using openbsd ‘cos it’s the most secure.”)
• The BDM’s are selling whatever they can to get their commission and move onto the next sale (“Yeah, of course, we can do that – easy!”)
• The engineers are making products that make sense to the engineers.

Enter the “Quality Manager” and the “Quality Management System”. Armed with some big thick books that mention ‘compliance’ and ‘audit’ enough to scare any CEO or company director to death, they are given a time and budget to deal with these issues. Ever the expert negotiator, they are able to withstand the barrage of meaningless technical gibberish from the geeks and meaningless non-technical gibberish from the sales people and get down to the bottom of the issues by listening to the … wait for it… customers!

But, to perform this miraculous feat, the quality manager needs a tool to help them:

• Determine quality reference models or benchmarks to track against
• Identify key customer groups
• Build customer measurement systems for each customer group
• Collect and collate customer data (CIT, Loyalty Survey, etc)
• Analyse and quantify collated data
• Set priorities for quality improvement
• Maximise the resources available to implement quality improvement

So, the quality management concept is a big hit and management endorses it with gusto. In principle, approval is given to develop a web application which tracks all of the above requirements, but with particular focus to the collection and collation and analysis of customer data. However, all of the above requirements are tracked in the system.

The .NET platform is selected by the IT Manager because he was given a free MSOffice 2007 from his last junket *cough* conference. Now, the question is whether it makes sense to pay for the additional expense of MOSS, or just save the bloat and roll our own.

The analysis

Unlike the other two scenarios, we are doing a comparison between platforms, to see how each compare in terms of expense. But my methodology in the last two scenarios was based on Microsoft’s SharePoint governance checklist. Is it fair to compare systems using a checklist specifically designed for SharePoint? Maybe not, but luckily the checklist items are mostly generic anyway.

Below I will estimate cost with and without SharePoint.

Information Architecture and Taxonomy

This is the one governance area that is poorly named when not using SharePoint. I was tempted to call it “functional design” to make it more generic but decided against it because I wanted it to be consistent with the last two scenarios.

For SharePoint, this scenario is an application with a specific scope, so it does not have a wide ranging information architecture compared to the collaborative scenario. In addition, although it is web based, it is not a large amount of content compared to the WCM scenario. SharePoint has already provided the building blocks (sites, content types, libraries, columns and workflows). In theory this will save development time. From my experience however, knowing how best to use these building blocks is very important and carries with it a degree of risk.

A bad programmer will always make a bad application, but add the SharePoint layer to it, and it can be truly terrible. (I will account for the risk in the cash flow calculations in the next section)

For .NET, we still have some of these components available (for example, windows workflow foundation). But more work will be required to develop the functional design because there will inevitably be more ‘building block’ work.

The cost to develop the information architecture/functional design for such an organisation in SharePoint is estimated to be a 10 man-day engagement for an external consultant. To do the same in .NET is assumed to be 20 man day engagement. However I will assume that internal resource cost is the same for both. (20 man days).

Project and Operational Management

Project Management, Project Communication, Deployment Process, Governance Tasks and SLA.

Governance tasks, such as change control and deployment processes, need to be finalised and agreed upon. However the first two scenarios were essentially ‘platforms’ that collaborative or WCM ‘applications’ can run upon. In this scenario, we are talking about an application and the platform is not the focus. In saying that though, you have one case where the application sits on the SharePoint platform. As you should know by now, SharePoint has its own governance requirements here. Contrast that with a custom .NET app may be as simple as a website and SQL database. This is a much simpler and easier to manage scenario.

Since in both cases the platform will be re-usable for other projects, we will apportion 50% of the platform related governance costs to this project.

In relation to communications planning though, I do not see a great deal of time difference between platforms with this area of governance.

The cost to develop the project and operational management for such an organisation is estimated to be a 15 day engagement for an external consultant for SharePoint and 5 days for .NET, but as stated, we will halve this to account for platform re-use:

Development and Configuration

Since this is a custom development scenario, it stands to reason that there will be a lot of development work! You betcha! This is a line of business application, yet it is likely to also be used by customers as part of the data collection process. So branding will be important in the sense that it needs to ideally be in keeping with the corporate style guide of the company.

But branding pales into insignificance compared to the actual development work. SharePoint should fast-track this, because of a more rich set of features and building blocks than you get from an out of the box .NET environment. If you want a detailed presentation on what you can get out of a SharePoint based development platform, then head on over to this presentation “Beyond Web Parts: Rapid Web Application Development using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0″ written by Nadeem Mitha.

For the sake of this scenario, we are going to assume that SharePoint applications can be developed in one third of the time of their .NET equivalent. The estimated cost to cover the development/configuration and branding for our organisation is 40 days for SharePoint and 120 man days for .NET. This is a 50/50 split between external and internal resources.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is a bit of a tough one in this scenario. To keep it simple, I will go with the costing in scenario 2 with two major exceptions. This application is nowhere near as disk space intensive as collaboration and WCM, so we will not allocate any costs to SAN infrastructure. This application will not be considered mission critical, to no costs are apportioned to redundancy features like network load balancing and SQL clustering.

Furthermore, we are working on the principle that other applications will be used on this platform, so we apportion only 50% of the cost of hardware to this project. (In reality it is probably a much smaller number).

Ratio of internal staff to external when it comes to infrastructure rises to 80/20%.

License costs as mentioned in article 2 were derived from Microsoft’s License Advisor site, but bear in mind their own disclaimer that it is for informational purposes only. You must use the advisor site yourself!

Testing and Provisioning

In this governance category, we are concerned with sorting out testing for security, stability and user acceptance. Testing costs are the same irrespective of platform. We need to identify test groups, create test plans testing and allow time and resource to respond to issues raised. For provisioning, we determine the approval process for information policies such as expiration, compliance and auditing, then document user policies and rights policies for securing restricted areas.

Operational Concerns

Much of the operation of SharePoint or .NET platform is not really a part of this application scenario. There are operational governance in relation to the quality management application we are developing of course, but it is likely to be less than the platform operational costs. So to keep it easy, I will apportion 50% of the WCM scenario estimate to this area as that covers the platform costs, and I will assume that application operational costs are half the platform costs.

You may have noticed that this conveniently equals the costs estimated for the WCM scenario Funny that! Also, since .NET platform is a much simpler platform, I assume that the operational costs are half the SharePoint cost.

Education and Training

Training content and materials need to be acquired for users who will be involved in the content creation or management of the application. This cost is the same irrespective of the platform. Training costs will include a figure for lost productivity based on the payroll assumption specified in part 2 ($75,000 per annum per staff member, broken down to per hour cost of $42 from 220 working days a year).

In this scenario, like WCM, we will assume that 10% of staff will require training. This is not an application that all staff will use.

Complete 3 years cost

So once again this is the point of the post where I advise you to make your own estimates. My estimates above are likely  to be completely off base for your own requirements Your job is to find a methodology that suits you and then use it to estimate the costs. Then can you apply the techniques below to analyse the financial implications.

So here we go. Let’s total up the costs for years 0 to 3 for SharePoint

Initial Costs: 28,000 + 99,000 + 80,000 + 50,000 + 18,000 + 66,000 + 73,200  = $414,200

Year 1: $24,500

Year 2: $24,500

Year 3: $3,600

So, our total estimated outlay for the SharePoint scenario is $466,800.

Now let’s do the .NET equivalent

Initial Costs: 40,000 + 81,000 + 240,000 + 36,500 + 18,000 + 33,000 + 73,200  = $521,700

Year 1: $11,100

Year 2: $11,100

Year 3: $3,600

So, our total estimated outlay for the .NET scenario is $547,500.

Quantifying the benefits

Now this is an interesting scenario, because the application benefits are the same no matter what platform you choose. This leads to the inevitable question, “Why use .NET?” It clearly will cost us more over 3 years. ($547,500 compared to $466,800 for SharePoint).

The answer is: What about risk? SharePoint is a new platform and therefore there are increased risks associated with using it. I am writing this post in December 07 and in my area, suitably qualified developers, project managers and architects are in short supply.

But anyway I digress. Let’s work out a very simple set of benefit cash-flows to cost justify the project first.

In the last scenario, the company was facing the prospect of stagnant market share and little margin to increase prices. Let’s say that upon implementation of this system, the company is able to increase market share and increase profit margin by a small amount per year.

Here is the projected improvement in profit for this organisation based on increased margin.

• Year 1: $200,000
• Year 2: $300,000
• Year 3: $700,000

The Discounted Cash Flow (SharePoint)

So, we take all of the above and produce a cash flow from SharePoint and then .NET

SharePoint Implementation.

The discount rate that I will use is 16%. Using excel:

• -414200+NPV(0.16,175500, 275500, 696400)

and the result is…

• = $387,988

So this suggests that you would be nuts not to implement this project. Bear in mind, I apportioned a lot of the hardware/infrastructure costs, but still, you are talking about a 3 year return of $387,988 from your original investment of $414,200). This represents a 93% return on our initial $414,200 after 3 years or 31% per annum.

This sort of return makes your CFO happy!

The Internal Rate of Return (SharePoint)

So, now let’s estimate the discount rate that would make this SharePoint application a break-even proposition. This will allow us to see how much risk leeway we have.

If I put the year 0 to 3 cash flows into cell A1 to D1 as…

The IRR formula looks like:

• =IRR(A1:D1)

and the result is…

• 55%

This is also an excellent result. It means that based on our current cash flow, the discount rate would have to be higher than 55% before you would consider it not worth the risk.

So, since the cheaper SharePoint proposition has such a great return, would we even consider .NET? Well let’s run through the numbers and then account for risk.

The Discounted Cash Flow (.NET)

Let’s do the calculation for the ..NET solution first up.

.NET Solution.

The discount rate that I will use is 16%. Using excel:

• -521700+NPV(0.16,188900, 288900, 696400)

and the result is…

• = $301,999

Still a brilliant result. A 3 year return of $301999 from your original investment of $521,700). This represents a 58% return after 3 years or 19% per annum.

The Internal Rate of Return (.NET)

So, now let’s estimate the discount rate that would make this .NET application a break-even proposition. This will allow us to see how much risk leeway we have.

The IRR formula looks like:

• =IRR(A1:D1)

and the result is…

• 42%

Another great result.  It means that based on our current cash flow, the discount rate would have to be higher than 42% before you would consider it not worth the risk.

The Risk Factor!

Now this scenario is about risk. Although both options seems an absolute no-brainer from a financial justification point of view, our assumptions have shown that SharePoint looks to be the cheaper option on paper.

But as mentioned before, SharePoint right now suffers from being a new, popular platform, hamstrung by a lack of suitably qualified staff to undertake projects on it. Unlike say, Active Directory, we do not have the benefit of 6 years of hindsight to determine best practice.

Accordingly, SharePoint on paper is the better solution, but the .NET solution should be viewed as a lower risk option.

How do we account for risk, then?

We adjust the discount rate!! Go back to my first article and find the section entitled “Accounting For Risk” for a refresher.

So, SharePoint is considered a platform that carries with it considerable risk. We will now compare SharePoint to .NET again, but this time use a 25% discount rate for SharePoint.

I’ve re-pasted the NPV formulas from above and changed the discount rate for SharePoint to 25%.

• SharePoint: -414200+NPV(0.25,175500, 275500, 696400)
• .NET: -521700+NPV(0.16,188900, 288900, 696400)

And the results are:

Interesting huh? So what this tells us is that initial figures do not necessarily paint the full picture! Based on the 25% discount rate, .NET looks to be the way to go!

For what its worth, I would probably go with SharePoint regardless, because this risk reduced over time, as the skills supply/demand balance sorts itself out and people get a few implementations under their belt.

Conclusion

This is the sort of scenario that is fun to write about. This is because it is the basis from which you can do a scenario that say, compares SharePoint to WebSphere or one of the other players in the application server platform space. If I wanted to be really controversial I could take on Windows vs Linux but I don’t think I could handle the hate mail.

But the point is that instead of IT Managers using whichever vendor takes them to the nicest corporate box at a football game to decide on a technology or vendor, you can actually apply some financial business justification as well.

Not that I am discounting the value of being taken to the corporate junkets.. I might drop the discount rate by 1-2% to take it into consideration -)

*repeat repeat blatant plug alert* – if you would like to undertake a more comprehensive feasibility study for your company along these lines, with detailed technical and governance considerations, logical architecture with financial modelling, contact me

So, that is the last of the scenarios for now.. Please register and reply if you have found the content of this series useful or contact me privately. There are various directions I can take this series and you can have a direct influence on it.

Thanks

Paul

                      

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Welcome to the fourth article in my series that attempts to bridge the cultural divide between nerds and accountants. Unfortunately there are more differences to these two strange species than just fashion sense and whether a pocket calculator is in their possession. But despite being poles apart about what pushes their buttons, at the end of the day they are both trying to achieve a positive result.

The first article introduced the financial concept of discount cash flow, net present value and internal rate of return. Next, we discussed how I came up with the three scenarios and the assumptions and methodology behind valuing the scenarios, which placed a specific emphasis on costing the holistic view of governance. .

The previous article to this one was the first of these three identified scenarios, internal corporate collaboration. This time, we are going to take on a popular SharePoint scenario centered around web content management (WCM).

Please Note: This is a very, very simplistic scenario and is in no way comprehensive. It is designed purely as a guide only! Please do not take it as gospel! Make sure you read my assumptions!

Like my last post, I’ll try my best to make this an entertaining read, but there is a reason why accountants aren’t exactly the life of the party! (No offense intended to accountants reading this, but you have to admit, finance to the masses ain’t fun – and this article is pitched at IT people So you had better load up. One RedBull or a large double shot latte is recommended.

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The problem

Our 1000 staff organisation, used in the last scenario, happens to manufacture and sell a wide variety of sophisticated devices and appliances around the world. These are complex products, requiring properly trained and experienced professionals to assist with their deployment. There are hundreds of products across various IT disciplines, ranging from low end  sub $1000 devices to high end $250,000+ devices.

Despite great product success, support costs are very high. The organisation needs to present huge amount of content online for users, resellers and integrators. There are technical manuals, installation guides, software updates, white-papers, marketing material, and so forth. The current web site has been completely outgrown and cannot cope with the amount of information that needs to be pushed out to support the product range.

The site is difficult for staff to update, and is powered by an aging platform. Selling product all around the world, managing multi-lingual content across various vertical markets is also problematic. The main head office would like to distribute the same content in multiple languages to their various specific vertical market web sites. However, this is virtually impossible and a highly manual process. Providing a consistent brand for the various web sites is tough,as the web sites were originally branded years ago. Also, it is a difficult and time consuming exercise to update the design and brand with a newer version across the company. Web site search is terrible with the results returned not really relevant for searches made, and the search is not across all content accessible through the web sites.

Management of content approval is time consuming and cumbersome and it takes a long time to update simple content in the web sites, to the point where timely and relevant information to customers and partners is unreliable

The business drivers

Technical support costs are very high, and despite many clients opting for 24*7 maintenance contracts, much of the margin of this maintained is lost to the high ongoing support costs. Support team turnover as a result is high due to a high percentage or frustrated and unhappy customers and resellers. Persistent dissatisfaction has started to affect the company’s reputation in the marketplace, and as a result market share is stagnant and smaller, more nimble competitors are pushing hard with similar products in the marketplace.

It is absolutely critical therefore, that customers and partners can easily find the relevant content they require on the web site. This will reduce support calls, improve productivity and morale of the support department, leading to improved customer satisfaction, increased sales and keeping the competition at bay.

The analysis

This example assumes that the entire site is run centrally and most content is created at head office. Two levels of access are provided. One for end-user access and another for resellers and other professionals certified with the company. Here we have ‘premium’ content.

If you are interested in the numbers only, and don’t care about how I went about determining them, then you can skip this section and go straight to the next section titled “Complete 3 Years Cost”.

Information Architecture and Taxonomy

For an external facing web content management project, information architecture is very important. However, it is not as complex a task as it is for a collaborative document oriented as outlined in the previous scenario. Planning sessions will be required to identify site structure, sites, content types, libraries, columns and workflow in relation to content approval. Finally, as well as anonymous access for the general user base, we are also requiring SQL authentication for those users accessing premium content.

Most of this task is best performed with a WCM specialist, however a dedicated information architecture professional is not necessarily required, as we are pretty much dealing with web content. Instead, a CMS specialist with web development and SharePoint skills like Yoda Sezai (just make sure you tell him Paul sent you so I get my finders fee! )

Wire-frames will be built for the most popular pages. A site-map to plan the overall structure will be developed, then expanded out to lower-level sites and sections.

The cost to develop the information architecture for such an organisation is estimated to be a 10 man-day engagement for an external consultant and ongoing review is 5 man days for an external consultant. (Don’t forget our 25/75 assumption so internal staff are 3 times the external staff).

Project and Operational Management

Project Management, Project Communication, Deployment Process, Governance Tasks and SLA.

Governance tasks, such as change control and deployment processes, need to be finalised and agreed upon. A Governance committee needs to be established to review these controls, obtain service level agreements from the business and set up support/helpdesk arrangements. However, for an external facing web content management scenario, a communications plan is not as essential as it is for a collaborative scenario. With a WCM scenario such as this one, the day to day operation of your workforce is largely unaffected except those staff involved in content creation or content management. Thus, the communications plan is more targeted and more focused to a smaller user base.

The cost to develop the project and operational management for such an organisation is estimated to be a 5 day engagement for an external consultant:

Development and Configuration

Now we hit one of the WCM big ticket items. In this category, we are talking about custom development and the all important branding. We need to define and communicate allowed customization tools, define site definitions, templates and the policies governing content creation, approval, publishing and translation of content. Source code and build control, documentation standards and development security requirements.

Branding is massively important in a WCM scenario. Not only does the content have to be up to date and relevant, it has to be presented in the most easy and intuitive way possible. In addition, your site should be standards compliant, browser agnostic, bandwidth efficient and be totally schmicko! (‘Schmicko’ is official branding speak for looking good).

I am deliberately not doing too much custom development in this scenario – sticking to a stock WCM deal.

So in a WCM scenario, go with the professionals! So, the estimated cost to cover the development/configuration and branding for such an organisation is 50 man days. 30 days of the external consulting work is in and around branding and the rest of the time in development/configuration guidelines. In the case of branding though, I am not going with the 25/75% ratio in the assumptions. It’s a 50/50 split.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure in a WCM scenario is just as important as the collaborative scenario. However, the focus now is on security, and availability. As per the last scenario, this section does not do this topic justice, but I have to really strip it down to the bare essentials.

One key difference between the collaboration scenario and this WCM scenario is disk growth. It’s nowhere near what it is when you have your workforce saving their day to day file work in SharePoint. So in this scenario, I’ll not be costing as much into SAN and assuming there is not need for new backup infrastructure except backup agents for the servers. However, since reliability and availability is still a big ticket item, I will be assuming clustered SQL servers and load balanced web front end servers. Search and indexing will be handled by a dedicated non load balanced WFE server to reduce load on the primary WFE boxes.

We are assuming that the firewall and security infrastructure already exists, but load balancing infrastructure does not. Redundant internet access is not a consideration here either.

Ratio of internal staff to external when it comes to infrastructure rises to 80/20%.

License costs as mentioned in article 2 were derived from Microsoft’s License Advisor site, but bear in mind their own disclaimer that it is for informational purposes only. You must use the advisor site yourself!

Testing and Provisioning

In this governance category, we are concerned with sorting out testing for security, stability and user acceptance. We need to identify test groups, create test plans testing and allow time and resource to respond to issues raised. For provisioning, we determine the approval process for information policies such as expiration, compliance and auditing, then document user policies and rights policies for securing restricted areas.

Operational Concerns

This is a very important governance section, and the amount of time and effort spent here should reflect the size, scope and eventual company dependence on this project. Monitoring of all components must be established, such as the network, firewalls, servers, SQL and SharePoint. ISO27001 security controls and ITIL oriented administrative functions such as change and service response procedures need to be defined and signed off. Disaster recovery plan, backup methodologies, recovery testing must be completed and signed off. Operation costs are annual costs, however for simplicity, we will just record as up-front costs. In this section I assume an 80/20 ratio between internal and external.

Never scrimp this section! Especially disaster recovery!

Education and Training

Training content and materials need to be acquired for users who will be involved in the content creation or management of the WCM site. Training costs will include a figure for lost productivity based on the payroll assumption specified in part 2 ($75,000 per annum per staff member, broken down to per hour cost of $42 from 220 working days a year).

In this scenario, 10% of staff will require training.

Enterprise Search

In this section, we now integrate the information architecture and taxonomy defined earlier into our search planning. We need to ensure that only the best information is available for search indexing. We will use hit highlighting, best bets and possibly utilize the business data catalogue feature to enable search on product information contained in other internal systems.

A dedicated responsibility is to determine and maintain core relevancy settings for the installation, by implementing organizational enhancements of the noise words file, thesaurus file, and keyword best bests. This is an ongoing process as part of site management. (A 50/50 internal/external staff split).

Complete 3 years cost

So whether you think my above estimates suck or not, is beside the point. The point here is that you should make your own estimates. Only then can you apply the sort of techniques below to analyse the numbers.

So here we go. Let’s total up the costs for years 0 to 3.

Initial Costs: 36,000 + 90,000 + 132,000 + 247,000 + 18,000 + 66,000 + 73,000 + 10,000  = $670,000

Year 1: 18,000  + 99,200 + 4000 = $121,200

Year 2: 18,000  + 99,200 + 4000 = $121,200

Year 3: 18,000 + 19,200 + 4,000 = $41,200

So, our total estimated outlay for this scenario is $953,600.

Obligatory disclaimer alert! Again, I remind you the numbers here are not designed to reflect any particular circumstances. Your job as a reader is to take this methodology, and apply it to your own situation, in much more detail. For what it’s worth, licensing here only represents 25% of the overall implementation costs.

Quantifying the benefits

So we have our costs, now let’s quantify the benefits. Our areas of cost drain were based on support overheads. We want to reduce tech support costs and improve the margin on maintenance contracts. If we can reduce the number of front line support people, we can redeploy those staff to other areas of the business. This will improve morale and retention as staff will have a better defined career path. (We all know that no-one wants to work in tech support).

So, what do we need to know in order to work this out? Well, our finance can tell us how much the maintenance contracts are worth a year. So let’s assume that we sell $20 million worth of products. 20% maintenance of this is $4,000,000 per year.

Since market share has stagnated in recent times, we do not expect to be able to grow the sales for the next three years. However we have had to increase support staff year on year. Currently we have 50 support team staff and this is expected to increase by 3 each year and overhead cost is expected to grow by 10% each year.

So 50 staff on tech support department at our $75000 assumption costs $3.75 million. Add in system costs and other overheads of $0.75 million and current support costs are $4.5 million. So clearly, support cost exceed maintenance revenue and this department is a cost center, not a profit center.

So here is the expected returns over the next 4 years.

So, based on the above table, support increased to almost $5.8 million, yet we’ve only received $4 million revenue for maintenance. Someone better turn this baby around! So lets all pretend we are a hotshot new general manager of support and see what we can do!

Competition means that we are limited in raising prices right now, and we also haven’t taken into account staff costs rising above $75,000 pa, nor have we factored in employee attrition and recruitment. Our initial aim is to reduce support costs to align with maintenance contracts.

So, let’s run a model based on the premise that new SharePoint WCM site reduces the number of support people we need to hire. Instead, we can keep support staff levels as they are. We know that if we can achieve this, then support costs will remain around the $4,5-5 million mark for the next 3 years. This is still a cost centre, but we can at least see whether spending money on this new website will save more money than spent.

So, the expected savings from not hiring 3 additional staff per year can be worked out by subtracting the year 0 staff cost in the above table from staff cost for year 1 to 3.

• Year 1: $225,000
• Year 2: $450,000
• Year 3: $675,000

These savings represent the ‘cash in’ part of the cash-flow. Ever heard of the saying, a penny saved is a penny made? (well… I think that’s how it goes anyway!

The Discounted Cash Flow

So, we take all of the above and produce a cash flow from it.

The discount rate that I will use is 16%, so let’s see how it goes!

In Excel, I plug in the following formula:

• -670000+NPV(0.16,103800, 328800, 633800)

and the result is…

• = $69,883

So, to put it simply, based on our up-front costs of $670,000 and then applying a 16% discount rate ,we have a NPV of $69,883. This represents a 10.5% return on our initial $670,000 after 3 years.

The Internal Rate of Return

So, now let’s estimate the discount rate that would make this project a break-even proposition. This will allow us to see how much risk leeway we have.

Once again, Excel is your friend here…

So, if I put the year 0 to 3 cash flows into cell A1 to D1 as…

The IRR formula looks like:

• =IRR(A1:D1)

and the result is…

• 21%

This is also a good result. It means that based on our current cash flow, the discount rate would have to be higher than 21% before you would consider it not worth the risk.

Playing with the numbers

Now, like the last scenario let’s play with our assumptions and review the numbers.

Let’s see what happens if the project goes over budget by 20%. Here are the adjusted cash flows where I have increased cash out by 20%.

Discount rate: 16%

• -804000+NPV(0.16,79560, 304560, 625560)
• = -$108,306   (negative!)

So, a 20% shows that we have a negative NPV. Like the previous scenario, this is enough to kill this project return. So let’s do the IRR calculation to determine the break-even discount rate?

• =IRR(A1:D1)

and the result is…

•  9%

So, what this tells us is that any discount rate over 9% will result in the project being uneconomic. So a project cost blowout of up to 20% is not a good thing!

Modelling Fun

So since I simulated a 20% cost blowout, let’s this time, assume that costs still blow out by 20%, but this new web site will allow us to contain our overhead costs as well as staff costs, so overheads now increase by 3% per year instead of 10%.

So, here is the adjusted expected overheads over the next 4 years compared to their original estimations.

So, let’s now adjust the cashflow table. We will increase the projects’ costs by 20% still, but add our overhead savings above to the staff cost savings previously worked out and show them in the ‘cash in’ column.

So, we take all of the above and produce a cash flow from it.

So, how much do we save now?

Discount rate: 16%

• -804000+NPV(0.16,132060, 416385, 804265)
• = $134,545  

So, what conclusion can we draw? If we contain our overheads as well as staff costs, then even a 20% project blowout still results in a positive NPV.

The IRR for what its worth is 24%. So this scenario was accurate, this is a project well worth implementing!

Conclusion

Phew! Scenario 2 has been done! Hopefully if you made it through the collaboration scenario, then this one was a snap!

I’d love to go on all day on scenarios here, for example, re-working this whole thing using Joomla or RedDot as the CMS would be a fun exercise, purely to make the various product fanboys out there cry foul . In fact I probably will do this, if I can find some volunteers to help. It certainly would be nice to look at the old platform wars from a financial perspective rather then technical stuff.

*repeat blatant plug alert* – if you would like to undertake a more comprehensive feasibility study for your company along these lines, with detailed technical and governance considerations, logical architecture with financial modelling, contact me

So, I hope that you took something positive away from this post and I look forward hearing if it made sense to you

Until next time,

Paul

                      

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Hi. This is the third article in a series that attempts to explain some financial analysis techniques to non financial oriented IT people. My first two articles in this series were theory and background and this is the first of three scenarios that illustrates an example.

This first scenario is an example of SharePoint as a collaborative solution. It also happens to be the scenario that for my money, carries with it the most risk. But at the same time, SharePoint is well suited to this sort of solution if you follow my branding and document management wisdom

Please Note: This is a very, very simplistic scenario and is in no way comprehensive. It is not designed purely as a guide only! Please do not take it as gospel! Make sure you read my assumptions!

Now I have to make a big warning here! This is a bit of a dry read unfortunately. Its kind of hard to make accounting into a funny and entertaining read. Maybe that explains why accountants never laugh at my jokes! So .. go and get a real BIG coffee mug with an extra shot ok? Just remember this: These sorts of feasability study type documents tend to be 50-100 pages and companies charge lots and lots for them! This is a very simple version.

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The problem

With 1000 staff, and several offices around the world, our sample organisation is seriously struggling with their current set-up. Despite using the latest MS Office suite, users can’t ‘find stuff’ and don’t know where to ‘put stuff’. Each office has its own file server with a shared network drive, however the folder structure is large, complex, out of date and unwieldy.

There is a file naming convention, but no-one knows it. People put stuff into the wrong folders. Files are forever being deleted or overwritten. Users store documents on their home PC’s or their email. There are departmental squabbles when changes are made without consultation. Multiple copies of documents abound, and no-one is quite sure whether they are working with the latest version. There are complaints that there is a lack of process, although processes are defined, however not followed because they are unenforceable and not communicated well.

The above problems are more acute with the remote offices due to communications constraints, limited support and infrastructure and as a result, over time those teams in the remote offices have started to do things their own way.

Technical support costs are high, with 30% of all helpdesk calls being for permission/filesystem issues. Daily restoration from backups takes the human equivalent of a full time support team member.

Sharing and working on files between different offices is non existent. Currently the idea of collaboration is the corporate email system.

Gee, I bet some of you are thinking.. that *does* sound familiar!

The business drivers

The larger the company grows, the more these problems are exacerbated. The company wants to improve internal efficiency by reducing the sort of time wasting problems described above. On top of that, the company wants to leverage the human assets it has in its remote offices so that work can be better shared where the skills lie. Head office costs are significantly more than the regional offices. So if work can be farmed out to these offices, there are significant cost savings to be had.

The analysis

This example assumes that a limited pilot has been conducted and for simplicity reasons, assumes that we are rolling out a central SharePoint farm at head office to be accessed by the remote sites. So let’s estimate the cost to implementing this scenario by following the governance checklist as described in my previous post.

If you are interested in the numbers only, and don’t care about how I went about determining them, then you can skip this section and go straight to the next section titled “Complete 3 Years Cost”.

Information Architecture

For a collaborative, document oriented project, information architecture is one of the complex project tasks to be performed. This is because each department in the organisation will have to be profiled or workshopped to identify sites, workspaces, content types, libraries, columns, workflow and search. For an organisation of this size and a project of this scope, we will engage an information architecture professional as suggested by Microsoft’s governance checklist. Working with key internal staff several key tasks will be performed. Wire-frames will be built for the most popular pages. A site-map to plan the overall structure will be developed, then expanded out to lower-level sites and sections. Finally, the information architecture professional will perform the most complex task of identifying and building content types for departments and regions.

The cost to develop the information architecture for such an organisation is estimated to be a 30 man-day engagement for an external consultant and ongoing review is 10 man days for an external consultant (don’t forget out 25/75 assumption so internal staff are 3 times the external staff)

Project and Operational Management

Project Management, Project Communication, Deployment Process, Governance Tasks and SLA.

For a collaborative, document oriented project, a communications plan is absolutely critical. Unlike say, WCM, you are impacting your entire workforce with a new way of thinking and a new way of operating. Undertakings of this scale tend to be branded within an “organisational change” framework that has its own budget. Governance tasks such as change control and deployment processes need to be finalised, as well as the establishment of a Governance committee to review these controls as well as obtain service level agreements from the business and set up support/helpdesk arrangements.

The cost to develop the project and operational management for such an organisation is estimated to be a 20 day engagement for an external consultant:

Development and Configuration

In this category, we are talking about custom development and branding. We need to define and communicate allowed customization tools, define site definitions, templates and the policies governing their creation. Source code and build control, documentation standards and development security requirements.

Branding is a big risk issue here, as I have spent much time talking about it. I am going to assume that sanity prevails here and branding is not a major consideration.

This category can be handled by internal resources. The cost to develop the development and configuration guidelines for such an organisation is estimated to be a 20 man days

Infrastructure

Now we hit a big section, but unfortunately I can’t cover it without making this section too large. So here is the ultra brief version. Given this is a collaborative scenario, it is generally internal facing so we won’t concern ourselves with firewalls, reverse proxy, extranet, etc.

Given that we are talking about a high value part of the business that affects all staff (file sharing), we are going to use clustered SQL servers and SAN Storage. The web front end servers won’t be load balanced initially, as the SQL server redundancy is considered more important. So we will have a WFE for user access to the collaborative solution and one WFE server for the index/query role. In Year 3, we will add a new WFE server and load balance with the first WFE server.

We are assuming that the SAN already exists, but we have added additional disk capacity to it, to accommodate expected disk growth after performing a Disk IO and growth analysis. Disk will be assumed to upgraded again in year 3.

The current backup infrastructure was deemed to be incapable of handling the additional requirements of SharePoint and a project was undertaken to replace it. 40% of this cost has been apportioned to SharePoint as other IT assets will make use of this infrastructure also.

License costs as mentioned in article 2 were derived from Microsoft’s License Advisor site, but bear in mind their own disclaimer that it is for informational purposes only.

Internal staff costs now grow from the original 75/25% ratio to 80/20% in relation to external work.

I know the above table is woefully incomplete but remember this is about finance calculations, not scenario accuracy!

Testing and Provisioning

In this governance category, we are concerned with sorting out testing for security, stability and user acceptance. We need to identify test groups, create test plans testing and allow time and resource to respond to issues raised. For provisioning, we determine the approval process for information policies such as expiration, compliance and auditing, then document user policies and rights policies for securing restricted areas.

Operational Concerns

This is a very important governance section, and the amount of time and effort spent here should reflect the size, scope and eventual company dependence on this project. Monitoring of all components must be established, such as the network, SAN, servers, SQL and SharePoint. ITIL oriented administrative functions such as change and service response procedures need to be defined and signed off. Disaster recovery plan, backup methodologies, recovery testing must be completed and signed off. Operation costs are annual costs however for simplicity we will just record as up-front costs.

Education and Training

This is another governance area that will incur more cost in this scenario that others, by virtue of the fact that the majority of staff will be impacted. In addition, collaborative functionality is a more complex area than web content management.

Training content and materials need to be acquired for users, administrators, help desk and developers. The logistics of providing training for a large staff base needs to be considered.

Training costs will include a figure for lost productivity based on the payroll assumption specified in part 2 ($75,000 per annum per staff member, broken down to per hour cost of $42 from 220 working days a year)

In addition, a rollout such as this would be staged over a period of time. In our model, we will assume that 50% of staff are trained in year 1, and 50% in year 2. Ongoing training in year 3 is 20% of the year 1 and 2 costs.

Complete 3 years cost

This is probably enough (otherwise will we ever get to the financial calculations? .

Let’s total up the costs for years 0 to 3

Initial Costs: 108,000 + 144,000 + 16,000 + 278,000 + 22,000 + 66,000 + 16,000 = $650,000

Year 1: 36,000 + 135,000  + 84,000 = $255,000

Year 2: 36,000 + 135,000  + 84,000 = $255,000

Year 3: 36,000 + 46,000 + 33,000 = $115,000

So our total estimated outlay for this scenario is $1,275,000

Holy crap! “Are you sure”, you ask me? Again I remind you the numbers here are inconsequential and the important thing is the methodology and the financial analysis. But in saying that, this is actually less than my most recent real-world collaborative project!

Quantifying the benefits

So we have our costs, now let’s quantify the benefits to our 1000 staff to create our cash flows.

If you go back to the section of this post entitled “The Business Drivers” there were several key cost savings.

1. The company wants to improve internal efficiency by reducing wasted time on typical file server issues
2. The company wants to leverage the staff available in its remote offices

We can also infer administrative savings via reduced backup/restores and improved helpdesk efficiencies. But for simplicity, let’s just look at the internal efficiency across our end users.

Since we have an assumption of staff costs ($75,000), we can do a simple savings model, based around an average productivity gain of 5 minutes per staff member per day. However, when implementing such a project like this, it is very likely that such a benefit will be realised over time, rather than straight away. So we are going to calculate this 5 minutes per day saving, by assuming that only 5% of staff have an immediate improvement, and each month, another 5% of staff gain the 5 minutes of efficiency. Therefore by year 2, we assume that our staff are now all 5 minutes more efficient.

Doesn’t sound like much, but let’s see how it looks! So, let’s do the math.

• 1000 staff, $75,000 per year. 220 working days a year and we will assume an 8 hour day.
• 75,000 / 220 / 8 = $43 per hour per staff member.

Now, let’s convert this to a 5 minute cost.

• 43 / 60 * 5 = $3.60.

Thus, as far as our assumption is concerned, 5 minutes of a staff members time per day is $3.60.

So, the daily saving for the entire payroll is:

• 3.60 * 1000 = $3600

Based on 220 working days per year the annual saving is $792,000

• 3600 * 220 = $792,000

Finally, as described above we are assuming a 5% take up rate per month, so below is the table showing this.

Now, the first year (I made 19 man days per month for ease of calculation except month 12 for a total of 220):

The second year figures are as follows:

Year 3 doesn’t need a big table. It is simply 220 * 3.6 * 1000 for a total of:

• $792,000

Now, I haven’t attempted to quantify the business driver of using staff across remote offices yet. But let’s do the cash flow analysis based on the costs and the 5 minute saving benefits just calculated.

The Discounted Cash Flow (finally!)

So, we take all of the above and produce a cash flow from it.

The discount rate that I will use is 16%, so let’s see how it goes!

In Excel, I plug in the following formula:

• -650000+NPV(0.16,-5520, 441240, 677000)

and (drumroll…), the result is…

• = $106,880

So, to put it simply, based on our up-front costs of $650,000 and then applying a 16% discount rate ,we have a NPV of $106,880. This represents a 16% return on our initial $650,000 after 3 years. This, so far, looks to be a good investment.

The Internal Rate of Return

Remember my explanation of this? Internal Rate of Return allows us to estimate the discount rate that would make the project a break-even proposition. This will help us to see how much leeway we have.

Once again, Excel is your friend here…

So, if I put the year 0 to 3 cash flows into cell A1 to D1 as…

The IRR formula looks like:

• =IRR(A1:D1)

and the result is…

• 23%

This is also a good result. It means that based on our current cash flow, the discount rate would have to be higher than 23% before you would consider it not worth the risk.

Playing with the numbers

Now, let’s play with our assumptions and review the numbers.

Let’s see what happens if the project goes over budget by 20%. Here are the adjusted cash flows where I have increased cash out by 20%.

Discount rate: 16%

• -780000+NPV(0.16,-56520, 390240, 654000)
• = -$119,722   (yeeouch!)

So, a 20% blowout completely kills the project as we have a negative NPV. What, then, is the break-even discount rate?

• =IRR(A1:D1)

and the result is…

•  9%

The project has a negative net present value if the discount rate is any more than 9%. Not good is it!?

Modeling Fun

So, if the caffeine is holding up and you are still with me, I hope that you start to see how we now have a model where we can modify the scenario in different ways and then repeat the calculations.

For example, we have neither quantify the benefits of farming out work to remote offices, nor come up with a way to work out a dollar figure for reducing helpdesk calls, improving response times, etc.

I am not going to do that here because you would need more caffeine in your system to keep your neurons going. But as a final example of fiddling with the model, let’s go back to the original cash flows except this time we base it on staff saving 4 minutes per day, instead of 5.

You can do the math yourself if you want to verify, however can tell you that the Year 1 to Year 3 cost savings for 1000 staff at a 5% uptake rate would be:

• Year 1: $199,584
• Year 2: $556,992
• Year 3: $633,600

Discount rate: 16%

• -650000+NPV(0.16,-54416, 301992, 548600)
• = -$121,016   (double yeeouch!)

As you can see, that one (1) minute can make a big difference!! Better cut out all toilet breaks as part of the SharePoint implementation to get it over the line!

Conclusion

This was a long post, and if you think it was hard to read, I can assure you it was a total bitch to write. But if you take anything away from this 3rd post in the series, I hope that you come away with an appreciation of the “non technical”, “non designer” and “non development” point of view.

All that has been presented here is just scratching the surface of this sort of financial modelling, but for my audience here, the material and concepts here are basically more than enough for your needs. When I have completed the other two scenarios, I’ll revisit some of the theory and cover some more advanced techniques  if I’m not completely sick of it

*blatant plug alert* – if you would like to undertake a more comprehensive feasibility study for your company along these lines, with detailed technical and governance considerations, logical architecture with financial modeling, contact me

So, I hope that you took something positive away from this post and I look forward hearing if it made sense to you

over and out..

Paul

                      

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Hi, there.

It’s been a while since my last post but the whole issue of having a life and earning money kind of got in the way. In addition I have been procrastinating a little, because writing about technical and programming type issues for me are a lot easier to write, compared to governance, strategy and financial matters.

To recap on my last post, I wrote about a common technique used to assess the value of an investment. I discussed the time effect on money, the concept discount cash-flow and some of the related calculations like Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR). If you have not read that article, I strongly suggest that you do so before continuing.

But I did say in part 1 of this series, that I would present some SharePoint scenarios for you and apply a discount cash flow to it so we can do some financial analysis. Before I do that however, we have to cover off two things.

• Firstly, I’ll explain how I came up with the three scenarios that I will do a basic financial analysis of.
• Secondly, it is difficult to value up a scenario without having a methodology to do it. So, I will also spend a little bit of time explaining this.

The SharePoint scenarios

Microsoft has a pretty good diagram that sums up the various capabilities of the SharePoint platform. I’ve pasted it below.

So, although that is a pretty easy-to-understand diagram and it’s probably popular on business development managers’ PowerPoint presentations, I do not think that you can realistically pick ‘content management’ or ‘portal’ as a SharePoint application scenario. Any given scenario is a combination of some or all of the above capabilities, with different weightings to the above capabilities depending on the scenario.

From the SharePoint implementations I have been involved with, there are three main areas that SharePoint has so far been deployed.

1. Web Content Management (internet and extranet sites);
2. Collaborative intranets and extranets; and
3. Web application development platform

Web Content Management

WCM is the easiest to explain. This is your typical medium to large internet site scenarios. It serves up web content such as HTML and multimedia with feature requirements such as version control, publishing and rollback, approval workflows, granular security permissions and search/retrieval. In addition, a template-based approach where much of the content is separated from the formatting. For example, the CMS may automatically set default colour, fonts, or layouts.

Collaborative Intranet and Extranet

Collaborative Intranet/Extranet scenario is all about document and form libraries, lists, workflows and MS-Office integration. Branding is less important than the functionality provided by the system. The aim in these type of scenarios is to improve business process, and make it easier to “find stuff”. Enterprise search is a biggie. Custom development tends to revolve around workflow coding and event handlers. ‘Folder hell’ from unmanageable shared network drives is also a large motivation in this category. This is the scenario where I spend most of my time and where most of this blog is centered upon.

Web Application Development Platform

Finally, the “Web Application development platform” scenario leverages SharePoint capabilities to speed up the development of sophisticated web-based applications. SharePoint provides a framework that allows many application components to be developed with no code. I recommend the presentation “Beyond Web Parts: Rapid Web Application Development using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0″ written by Nadeem Mitha. In his presentation, Nadeem discusses how built-in SharePoint features can save time/cost by facilitating no-code methods for performing:

• Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete (CRUD) functionality and search w/o code
• Security model and auditing without code
• Inheritance, item-level ACLs, security groups with ability to designate owners, draft item security, limit user to modifying only items they create
• Web services and RSS without code
• Recovery support via recycle bin without code
• Content approval, version history, alert notifications and workflow without code
• Support for creating and saving personal views without code
• Integration with Excel without code

So, now I have listed the scenarios that I will cover, let’s look at how we will go about doing this.

The methodology

“With great power comes great responsibility” – Peter Parker (2002)

Spiderman was definitely on to something when he uttered the above quote. He, of course, was referring to his spidey powers. But guess what readers, us mere mortals also have spidey senses that tingle too. Are you tuned in to yours?

Whether it’s SharePoint, Exchange, Linux, SAN, or some critical line of business application using all of those, there are some sites that I have visited where my spider senses were activated. Ever had the feeling that some IT environments are a ticking time bomb? Maybe I should rephrase that! Ever been to an IT site where you haven’t had your spider senses tingling?

For me, that spider sense is simply an implicit acceptance that governance is incomplete or missing at that site, so my financial methodology is governance heavy because I believe it is probably a higher cost than the licensing for the product. In addition, the governance exercise tends to reveal deficiencies in other areas within IT that need to be rectified (both infrastructure and business process).

Fortunately for me, Microsoft have published some good governance material. Their governance checklist is a pretty good document that you can use to ‘tick the boxes’ to ensure you have covered off all of the main areas of your planning process. Microsoft’s governance checklist divides governance up across nine categories.

• Information Architecture
• Project & Operational Management
• Development & Configuration
• Infrastructure
• Testing & Provisioning
• Operational Concerns
• Education & Training
• Taxonomy & Navigation
• Enterprise Search

So, this, in combination with Microsoft’s pretty diagram listing SharePoint capabilities, gives me a framework that I can use.

My methodology is pretty straightforward. I will examine our three scenarios, using the above categories of this governance guide document as well as the six core capabilities. For each scenario, I will (completely subjectively,of course) apply weightings to areas within those categories and capabilities that I feel are of greater or lesser importance to that scenario.

For example: Let’s look at “Operational Concerns” from the list above. Microsoft suggest you cover off these areas in your governance plan.

• Monitoring Uptime and DownTime
• Disaster Recovery
• Data and Document Recovery
• Quotas and Reporting

Specifically, under “data and document recovery”, it is suggested that you:

• Codify corporate records management requirements into SharePoint
• Define rules for archive of sites including warnings and approvals

In the case of a WCM scenario, records management requirements are unlikely to come into it compared to a collaborative intranet scenario. Thus, I would assign this a lesser weighting and as a result, estimate a smaller timeframe here than for a collaborative intranet.

Other Assumptions

Just remember that, above all, the purpose of this exercise is to learn the basics of financial modeling for non financial people. I need to make it perfectly clear that the costs used in the scenarios in no way, reflect your (my readers’) particular circumstances. If you are actually stupid enough to put these forthcoming scenarios in front of your boss and try and use them, then you deserve what you get. I feel I’m going to have to put a big disclaimer on the scenarios for this reason.

So ,before we even get into the nuts and bolts, here are some cost assumptions that I am going to use to analyse each scenario. We will stick to the these assumptions for all three scenario’s.

1. All costs are in Australian Dollars. I leave it to the reader to make their local currency adjustments.
2. I make no provision for tax
3. Unless I specify otherwise, we will assume that all human capital work will be performed by 75% staff and 25% external consultants.
4. We will assume that an internal staff member costs $100 per hour, and an external consultant costs $150 per hour.
5. We will assume that the average payroll cost is $75000 for each employee.
6. Microsoft licensing costs will be based on Australian figures reported from the Microsoft Licensing Advisor site.  I will deliberately be ambiguous with the figures from this site, because Microsoft have several license programs and license options. You will have to run these numbers yourself.
7. Estimates of capital costs for hardware, software or other projects will be RRP where available and best guesses where they are not (I will do my best to explain cost estimates).
8. Each scenario will be based around a medium sized Australian organisation with 1000 staff. It will consist of a metropolitan head office containing 60% of staff and the remaining 40% scattered around several regional offices.
9. ‘Road Warrior’ mobile portion of workforce in our example will be 20% of all staff.
10. Time estimates are subjective and simply based on my previous experience.

So, in the next post of this series, we will look at a “Collaborative Intranet/Extranet” scenario, and see what the numbers tell us

                      

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Nerds and CFO’s. If there is ever a group of people who don’t know how to talk to each other, it would be those two. Perhaps, I should write a book and call it “Nerds are From Mars, CFO’s are from Venus” (ok for those of you who did not get that little joke go here).

Now, not so long ago, I was a serious nerd. Not in a ‘have the latest gadget and bash Microsoft ‘cos it’s cool’ sense, but I got very deeply involved in the guts of the technology. I was heavy into infrastructure and security. Got a few certs to make my business cards and CV look good, etc. In addition, I *thought* that I understood business. I wrote reports and memos that used all the right ‘business sounding’ cliches. In my security work I wrote lovely risk assessments, good security policies, etc. I wrote technical architectures in loving detail, outlining the technical vision and strategy for the company going forward.

But guess what? Although I felt that I had a pretty good business acumen, I had trouble communicating with some senior management. I blamed them of course, damn computer illiterate luddites, the lot of them. To be fair, you have some who are technically savvy, but most of them are not.

(In fact, have you noticed that the size of a laptop, is inversely proportional to a person’s rank/computer literacy in an organisation?)

Jokes aside, the truth is, senior management simply have much bigger fish to fry, compared to caring about say, the technical advantages/disadvantages of say, an MPLS network versus a VPN or say, SharePoint versus Skype (yep, I got asked this). IT people (some IT Managers included) tend to argue benefits on technical and feature grounds, whereas most high level business decision making is made along financial grounds.

Technical considerations are critical in the decision making process of course, but that sort of criteria is why *you* are hired. Our CFO and senior management do not want to know nor need to know this. For them, put simply, it all boils down to:

• How much will it cost?
• How much will it make/save me in the future

In this article, I am going to attempt to explain the financial techniques that you can use to transform technical considerations into a costing model that will make sense to your CFO.

The techniques I cover here are used all of the time by senior management on a scale you can only dream of. Compare the cost/justification complexity of a SharePoint 2007 implementation to trying to determine how much to pay for another company in a buyout situation!

Time Value of Money

First up, we have to get a fundamental concept out of the way.

Money loses value over time!

Ever had a grandparent say “back in my day, it only costed me a penny to [insert often repeated boring story here]”? While an economy has inflation, the same amount of money will be able to buy less and less as time goes on. You will find that $1 now, will always buy you more than $1 would, say, 5 years into the future. Consider petrol over the last few years. How much petrol do you think you will get for $1 in 5 years time?

So, let’s discount the value of money over time by using the inflation rate.

If we assume an inflation rate of 3% per year, and start out with $100 now, we can discount the $100 by 3% per year. In doing this, we can reasonably assume that after 3 years, our $100 is effectively able to buy just over $91 worth of goods. Below is the table.

What we have done here is taken the present value (PV) of our money ($100) and estimated the future value of our money ($91.26) by discounting it by the inflation rate.

This can be expressed in a formula.

In our example:

• PV = $100,
• d  = -.03 (remember we are discounting by 3%)
• n  =  3 (we are discounting over 3 years)

100 * (1 – .03) ^ 3 = FV of 91.26

True investment value

So, if inflation was at 3% and you were offered an investment that returns %5 per annum, are you really getting a 5% return? Of course not. Inflation hasn’t been taken into consideration.

Your return would be more like 2% in real terms once you account for inflation.

So, what has this got to do with cost-justifying SharePoint, or any other IT investment for that matter? Well quite obviously, if we are going to take an initial outlay, and then determine the return of an investment over say, 3 years, we need to discount those returns to account for the time value of money.

Additionally, the discount rate to apply is actually significantly higher than the inflation rate. Why is this?

Now not all companies are awash with cash. Many have to borrow money to invest for the future and they have to pay commercial interest rates. Any investment made would have to have a better return that the interest rate.

The companies that do have surplus cash can put that money into the bank or invest it. Even after inflation, they can probably earn 6% per annum as interest on that investment. In addition, that 6% return is considered pretty safe – it’s a bank. This is known as the risk free rate. Basically no financial decision maker would approve expenditure on a project that had a projected return that is less than the risk free rate.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? So, how do we determine if a potential investment in a product or technology is worth it?

Discounted Cash Flow

Discount Cash Flow is a common financial technique that attempts to determine the present value of an investment by estimating the expected future cash flows of an investment. Now, if you are like what I used to be, and you’re not a financial kind of person, then this is best served with an example.

Let’s say, you spend $100,000 on a SharePoint investment. Each year, support and maintenance costs are $20,000. But on the good side, you estimate that you will do such a good job implementing it, that it will save the company $40,000 in costs per year after Year 1 and increase by $20,000 each year thereafter.

This is how you would express the cash flow over 3 years. Make a column for money spent and another for money earned/saved. Add the two together and you get your cash flow for a period.

For example:

So, after year 3, it shows that total outgoings are $160,000 (add up the “Cash Out” column). Total incoming is $180,000 (add up the “Cash In” column). Obviously more incoming than outgoing is a good thing. So we subtract our outgoings from the incoming…

Woohoo! We saved $20,000 ($180,000 – $160,000). That is a 20% return on the $100,000. Not a bad return on our initial $100,000, eh!? Management would be so proud of us!  We can demonstrate that our SharePoint project is going to be a good thing for our company.

Looking at it another way, we turned our $100,000 into $120,000 after 3 years. Thus, we would consider the present value of this investment to be $120,000. If we subtract the original outlay of $100,000, the net present value is $20,000

But wait!

Just before you go and ask for that well deserved bonus, one little thing. We forgot about the time value of money. The risk free rate is say, 6 percent. So we haven’t discounted by the risk free rate yet.

DOH!

Let’s say the risk free rate was 6%. So, how do we discount the above cash flows? Below is the formula. Put simply, each cash flow is discounted year on year by the discount rate. The cash flows are then added up just as we did above.

Here is the formula with our figures applied:

Now, let’s work out the discount rate formula:

NPV = -100,000 + 18868 + 35600 + 50377

NPV = $4845

So, this time after year 3 our net present value is $4 845. Thus, when you apply a discount rate of 6% to the cash flows, we turned our $100,000 into $104845 after 3 years. Thus, we would consider the present value of this investment to be $104 845. If we subtract the original cost of $100,000, the net present value is $4 845.

That translates to a return of 4.8% over 3 years. Hmmm, that’s like.. 1.6% per year.

If you are thinking “well that is okay, it’s still saving money”, I have some bad news for you.. .but we will come back to this as we have to do the Excel thing…

Excel is your friend

Now that I showed you the maths behind discount cash flow and net present value, I’ll show you the quick and easy way to do it. Excel has a built in formula to generate the result quickly and easily.

The function is called NPV and takes the following parameters:

NPV(rate,value1,value2, …)

Rate  is the rate of discount over the length of one period.

Value1, value2, …   are arguments representing the payments and income

The excel version of the previous example is:

=-$100 000+NPV(0.06,20000,40000,60000)

= $4 844.94

Accounting for Risk

We used an interest rate for the discount rate in our example. But ,is that a fair and accurate discount rate? There are other factors to consider. We also have to consider the risk of the project as well. A really high risk project should have a ‘risk premium’ attached to the discount rate.

Unfortunately, a discussion on determining an appropriate discount rate is beyond the scope of this article. My suggestion here is simply to ask your finance department to give you a discount rate to use. They would be used to doing this sort of thing. What I can say is a discount rate between 10-16% is pretty common.

Now, SharePoint 2007 is a big undertaking. There are many mistakes you can make in an implementation, from business analysis, requirements gathering and project management, as well as the risk of a poor implementation (and some things I have written about such as document management and branding .

In project management terms, your time and budget estimate is usually accompanied by a +/- percentage estimate that accounts for risk. A large SharePoint deployment project may have a +/-40% attached to it. If that is your best estimate, then the discount rate should be higher than say, a project management estimate that is +/-10%.

So, to account for risk, let’s increase the discount rate to 15% and see what our NPV is.

This time we use Excel.

=-$100000+NPV(0.15,20000,40000,60000)

= -$12 911.98

OUCH! When you see a negative net Present Value, it is suggesting that the investment is not worth it. The estimated future cash flows do not give a return that justifies the risk of this investment.

Turning it on its head

So, it’s pretty clear that our mythical SharePoint scenario is actually a pretty crap investment and money is better spent elsewhere. But we have the formula now, and we can tweak the numbers to see what it would take to make this investment better.

Let’s leave the discount rate alone, assuming that finance have set the rate. So, what do we have to play with? The cash flow.

So, let’s assume that presented with your brilliantly conceived scenario, Microsoft caved in and discounted the license price . So, your initial outlay is $75 000 instead of $100 000.

Let’s plug it in, then!

NPV =-$75000+NPV(0.15,20000,40000,60000)

NPV = $12088.02

Better, I guess. If we look at our original outlay of $75 000,  $12 088 is a little over 16 percent over three years.

The Internal Rate of Return

Now, we’ve seen from the above example that a discount rate of 6% with our $100 000 outlay showed a NPV of $4 845. When we changed the discount rate, it changed to $-12 911.98! Quite often, we want to find out what is the discount rate, where the net present value is equal to 0. Why? Because this suggests the rate you need to return to break even!

Excel has an IRR formula, and it’s pretty easy to use. You enter each cash flow into cells and then wrap an IRR formula around it.

So, assuming -100 000 is in cell A1; 20 000 is in A2; 40 000 in A3 ; and 60 000 in A4, the formula looks like:

=IRR(A1:A4)

=8.21%

So, what this tells us is the discount rate to break even on our original SharePoint investment would need to be 8.21%. If your finance department tells you to use a discount rate of more than this (e.g. 15% as per my example in the section titled “Accounting for Risk”), then I suggest you not bother writing a big proposal .

And the SharePoint relevance is where?

In summation, I introduced you to the techniques you can use in evaluating if an investment offers a return that is good enough to offset any risk involved. We covered the theory of discount cash flows, net present value and internal rate of return. I haven’t covered everything you need, however, and a future article will expand on this.

I know this isn’t exactly the standard SharePoint blog fare.I’m not solving any technical problems here, or telling you about some fancy cleverworkaround programming technique. But ,this is a really important and often overlooked area of project initiation as part of the project management process. Despite the subject matter I have covered all of my other articles, this is the stuff that I am particularly interested in and I intend to write quite a few articles on this topic.

In my next article on this series, we will actually delve into some SharePoint project scenarios, run the numbers and see whether the investment is all worth it.

Thanks for reading

PS: For what it’s worth, I also use this technique as an aid in buying stocks too.

                      

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