Welcome to the fifth article in my series on fostering mutual love and respect between those know-it-all smartarse technical geeks and the guys who do their taxes!  This is the final SharePoint scenario that I will cover in this series, but there will be some more articles coming later, as we further look at the financial side of things.

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.

Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO: Web Application Scenario – Part 5”

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.

Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO in their language – Part 2”

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.

Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO in their language – Part 1”