IT Budgeting

IT Budgeting

Webinar Replay: Cost Optimization Best Practices for Software and IT Budgeting

Cost Optimization for Software and IT Budgeting Webinar

If you were unable to attend our recent webinar, "Cost Optimization Best Practices for Software and IT Budgeting," a replay is now available.

Managing spending and ensuring there is enough organizational capacity to fulfill client and stakeholder demands are challenges that thousands of software development and IT managers face every day. Leveraging a reliable data driven estimation and oversight process can save millions of dollars annually when carried out the right way. In this webinar, Keith Ciocco explains some of the best practices that QSM uses to help our clients improve their effectiveness when planning their project and portfolio budgets.

Keith Ciocco has more than 30 years of experience working in sales and customer service, with 25 of those years spent with QSM. As Vice President, his primary responsibilities include supporting QSM clients with their estimation and measurement goals, managing business development and existing client relations. He has developed and directed the implementation of the sales and customer retention process within QSM and has played a leading role in communicating the value of the QSM tools and services to professionals in the software development, engineering and IT industries.   

Watch the replay!

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webinar IT Budgeting Capacity Planning

Upcoming Webinar: Cost Optimization Best Practices for Software and IT Budgeting

Cost Optimization for Software and IT Budgeting Webinar

Managing spending and ensuring there is enough organizational capacity to fulfill client and stakeholder demands are challenges that thousands of software development and IT managers face every day. Leveraging a reliable data driven estimation and oversight process can save millions of dollars annually when carried out the right way. In this webinar presented on Wednesday, April 21 at 1:00 PM EDT, Keith Ciocco will explain some of the best practices that QSM uses to help our clients improve their effectiveness when planning their project and portfolio budgets.

Keith Ciocco has more than 30 years of experience working in sales and customer service, with 25 of those years spent with QSM. As Vice President, his primary responsibilities include supporting QSM clients with their estimation and measurement goals, managing business development and existing client relations. He has developed and directed the implementation of the sales and customer retention process within QSM and has played a leading role in communicating the value of the QSM tools and services to professionals in the software development, engineering and IT industries.   

Register now!

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webinar IT Budgeting Capacity Planning

How Can You Leverage Big Data to Reduce Your IT Costs?

Today more than ever we have access to large amounts of information. You've probably heard the term "big data," which in essence is having access to large amounts of data and examining the trends in that data. But many executives want to know how they can leverage this information to solve business problems, like lowering IT costs. One way is to use the data to do a better job of estimating IT projects.

Better estimating helps avoid signing up to schedules and budgets that are unrealistic; it helps avoid overstaffing a project or a portfolio of projects; and it helps calculate how much work can be completed within project constraints. In addition, it improves communication internally across the enterprise and externally between the vendor and the client. You can apply estimation to in-house projects and you can use it to generate better proposals or to do a better job of evaluating proposals.  It can also help you negotiate more effectively.

To do a better job of estimating, you need to make good decisions regarding which metrics to leverage. You might have thousands of data points, but it's important to streamline the focus to the core release level metrics: cost, duration, effort, reliability, and productivity.  Next, you need to find a centralized place to organize and store the data so you can analyze it. There are tools out there that can help you. In the view below, you can see a portfolio of projects stored in a centralized place with the ability to manage the access and security.

Big Data to Reduce IT Costs

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Data IT Budgeting Estimation

IT Cost Optimization and Cloud Solutions at Gartner Symposium/ITXpo

QSM at Gartner Symposium/ITXpo

The QSM team had a productive trip to the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. It's always helpful for us to discuss IT current trends and challenges with the people in our industry. Many of these themes came to light as we provided SLIM-Suite product demonstrations along with question and answer sessions at the QSM exhibit.

One of the big areas of interest at the conference was IT cost optimization, which is also one of QSM’s main areas of expertise. I hosted a presentation called “Cost Optimization Best Practices for IT Portfolio Budgeting.” The main focus of the presentation was to show how we can leverage empirically-based models and predictive analytics to balance enterprise demand with capacity and at the same time save big money in the IT budgeting process. The presentation was well-attended and a meet and greet session followed where our QSM team, consisting of Ethan Avery, Richard Pelaez, Greta Moen, and I, provided solution demonstrations and answered questions.

Another big focus of the conference was related to cloud solutions and how they will affect the internet of things and artificial intelligence. Our team featured our cloud solution, SLIM-Collaborate, which provides portfolio analytics and the ability to estimate the cost and risk of creating new software technologies. We provided examples of how we support all types of software & systems projects and explained the benefits of having a secure process for leveraging this information across the enterprise.

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IT Budgeting QSM News

Webinar: Best Practices for IT Portfolio Budgeting

IT budgeting is anything but simple, so why do so many organizations do it in an overly simplistic way? Instead of relying upon detailed task-based spreadsheets and wild guesses, IT budgeting should be leveraging historical data and predictive modeling. This webinar will discuss the business process and application of estimation to the challenges of building the annual IT budget. Presented by QSM's Larry Putnam Jr. on October 11 at 11:00 AM EST, this upcoming ITMPI webinar will focus on how this process can support the following aspects of portfolio management: Pipeline - Demand Management, Risk Management, Resource Management, or Financial Management. Larry will demonstrate how a macro-level estimation process can leverage the very basic information typically available early in the development cycle to generate release level budgeting information. He will then show how to aggregate the releases to provide portfolio level assessment and adjustments that will conform to business level constraints. This webinar will be useful for anyone involved in or responsible for building the annual IT budget. 

Register for this webinar!

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Webinars IT Budgeting Demand Management

Gartner Symposium Presentation: Cost Optimization for IT Portfolio Budgeting

QSM is pleased to announce Keith Ciocco will be presenting "Cost Optimization for IT Portfolio Budgeting" on Monday, October 2 at 6:10 PM on the Emerging Technologies Stage at the upcoming Gartner Symposium/ITXpo. This presentation will highlight cost optimization techniques in the annual IT budgeting process. Instead of relying upon detailed task-based spreadsheets and wild guesses, attendees will learn how to leverage historical data and predictive modeling for more accurate and cost-effective IT budgeting.

Additionally, QSM will be exhibiting SLIM tools and consulting services in the Emerging Technologies Area. Stop by booth ET14 to get a live demo and learn more about our IT budgeting and demand management solutions.

 

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QSM News IT Budgeting

How Can Organizations Optimize Costs in the IT Budgeting Process?

It’s that time of year again for many C-level executives: time to figure out the IT budget for next year. This is to bring the business side of the organization to the table with the technical side to forecast how much IT is going to spend. It can be a complicated process, but there are ways to make it easier and more accurate; and there are ways to save a lot of time and money. The challenges often relate to short planning time frames, minimal information available to generate accurate forecasts, political agendas within the organization, and, unfortunately, only a small number of estimation methods in place. But there are tools and processes available to help face these challenges. Here are the basic steps that we recommend for cost optimization in the budgeting process.

Start by analyzing the historical data that is available. The process can be streamlined by focusing on the core metrics within the organization. This data can include release level size, effort, staff, and duration information. Historical data showing typical effort by role by month spending is also valuable to leverage. Ideally, this type of data should be captured on 8-15 projects.

The next step is to pull together scope level sizing data on projects that are being considered for the new year. This information can include epics, themes, user stories, business requirements, or use cases, to name a few. The goal here is to get as close as possible to determining how much work needs to be done on each release in the pipeline. Once there is a large enough sample of data, then release level estimates can be created for the coming year. There are tools available to help streamline this process and the best ones allow for risk mitigation and sanity checking with historical data.  

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IT Budgeting Estimation

New Article: How to Avoid the 3 Top IT Project Risks

Government IT Project Risk

For a number of years, the federal government has been on a mission to reduce waste and enhance efficiencies across departments, including IT. But according to the CIO Council’s 2017 State of Federal Information Technology report, 43% of the federal government’s $80 billion in IT projects cataloged in September 2016 were listed as over budget or behind schedule. In this article for GCN, Doug Putnam takes a look at some of the common pitfalls that lead to project cost and schedule overruns and how parametric estimation can help government CIOs and their teams avoid these traps.

Read the article!

New Article: How Everyone Can Plan for 2017

2017 IT Budgeting

No one got into software development to budget. Developers love to code and create. If they wanted to create budgets, they’d have become accountants. Still, creating a development plan for 2017 is essential and will inevitably require budgeting and estimating, a process that should be done in partnership with business teams. This will ensure the creation of software that cost-effectively meets their needs. In this article, originally published on SD Times, Doug Putnam identifies three strategies for better budgeting and planning in the new year.

Read the article!

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Articles IT Budgeting

Agile Development and Software Estimation: Two Processes That Go Great Together

This post was originally published on Linkedin. Join the QSM Linkedin Group and Company Page to stay up-to-date with more content like this.

New approaches to software development can sometimes seem at odds with the needs of business customers. For instance, ardent practitioners of the agile development methodology continue to advocate for rapid response approaches and the need for constant iteration to solve complex problems. On the other hand, companies and customers are demanding a strategic approach that provides insight into process, timing, and costs.

So, which of these yin and yang scenarios should developers employ? The answer is “both.”

Enter scope-based software estimation, which I maintain can be a powerful tool to ensure that projects remain on course and on budget. It is possible for schedule and budget estimation to be achieved without sacrificing any of the things that make agile development so potent.

Not everyone feels the same. Some would argue that there’s simply no place for estimates in an agile development world; that estimates cannot coexist with agile or “lean” methodologies like Scrum, which encourage teamwork, speed, and communication without constraints.