Timing and money
Timing is an important factor for bringing in a new application development technology. While keeping a competitive edge is undoubtedly critical to long-term success, your company likely will wait to move forward until you can show them that doing so makes good fiscal sense. You need to be able to show that the new direction can have a positive impact on the company’s TCO.
The TCO is a calculation that includes all of the costs incurred in using technology and services, and it includes direct costs, like hardware, software, and employee resources, as well as indirect costs, such as training, maintenance, and other intangible costs.
Direct costs
The direct costs (the actual cost of purchasing equipment and services, for example) of using new development technology can vary greatly, especially when newer, faster, or more expensive hardware is required. When making your case, it helps to:
- Determine what constitutes “long term” and “short term” in the eyes of management and decide which one the company is known to focus on. Show how the direct-cost projections affect the time span most important to them.
- Start cautiously. You have a better chance for success if you implement the new technology on an application that is not mission critical.
- Keep it small. Divide the development project into phases. Reduce it to its simplest form for phase one. Let that success build on itself in phase two, three, or five. Project success comes down to making the budget and timelines and having the application function. Add gizmos and gadgets later.
Indirect costs
Indirect costs are somewhat harder to put a price tag on and include such things as lost productivity and downtime. These costs, however, are a vital component of controlling the TCO. Despite the perception that indirect cost savings are a hard sell to executive management, diligent attention to indirect costs can help reduce total cost, especially when the TCO model reflects the financial impact over the useful life of an installation, whether in-house or commercial-off-the-shelf applications (COTS). Let’s look at some ways you can reduce indirect costs on new projects.
In the code
- Design your applications the way you help design the project: Break it down into small, reusable segments.
- Start with the generic and then add parameterized, easily modifiable sections. This is especially useful if the application might be used externally, but it’s also sound advice for in-house applications where business needs change frequently.
- Fully define your use cases or user roles. This will reduce production maintenance. Peer support constitutes 47 percent of all indirect costs, the largest percentage, according to the recent Gartner report “CIO Update: the Impact of Indirect Costs on Total Cost of Ownership” (May 31, 2000).
- Document your code well. Take advantage of document management tools.
- Implement and follow coding standards. High turnover is endemic in the industry. You might be placed on a new project or win the lottery. Coding standards allow others to pick up where you left off.
- Know the standards, know when to break them, but most importantly, document how and why you broke them.
- Conduct peer code reviews. This encourages programmers to develop according to standards and allows for good knowledge transfer.
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