Some things to consider for your next IT Plan of Record (POR) task

Many of you work on IT Plan of Records and it always seems a struggle to communicate why your teams requirements are more important than requirements from another team. Please note that in general it is very important to put a Dollar ($$$) value on your requirements. This could be for cost savings or for revenue increases but it needs to be crystal clear to everyone (Business/IT) what the expected benefit is when this requirement gets implemented. If you think you can't put a dollar value on it think about potential customer satisfaction and something like customer retention rates. How does your company value that?  Below I have put some notes and an example you might want to consider next time you work on an IT POR

To Do

1. Collect all business requirements from your stakeholders (global + regional requirements)
2. Determine overlap of these business requirements
3. Determine if you have cost savings or revenue increases when you implement these requirements
4. Size and prioritize the business requirements
5. Present to IT POR committee 

Example

1. Business Requirement: All products that are added to a quote need to remain valid as long as the quote is valid.  Example: Quote 123 is valid for the next 30 days. Product ABC is only valid for 10 more days hence product ABC should not be added to the quote.
2. For our example let's assume that this is the same in all our regions (Americas, Europe/Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific).
3. This is clearly a cost savings requirement (.. with some additional aspects ...)
4. Questions to ask
• How many deals are currently impacted by this business requirement?
• Is every region equally impacted by this business requirement?
• What is the (manual) process to fix this issue if a product that is not valid for the whole quote validity period is added to a quote?
• How much time is needed to address this issue? ... and who is fixing it?
• What is the average annual Salary of the person that is fixing the issue?
• How much time is needed to communicate the solution of the issue (to the customer?)? .. and who is doing it?
• At the end we could have the following $ number (simplified)
• Quotes with invalid product numbers per year : 1,000 (globally)
• Time needed per quote to (in Min) to fix issue: 30min
• Communications needed (email, phone calls etc.) to clarify changes / confusion with customer/others (in Min) per quote: 20min
• Average Salary of person that is fixing the issue (according to HR tables): $60,000
• Average Salary of person that is communicating the fix for this issue (according to HR tables): $50,000

• Resulting $ amount
• 1,000 x 30min = 30,000min  (= 500 hrs / = 62.5 days)  (time to fix issue) 
• 1,000 x 20min = 20,000min ( = 333 hrs / = 41.5 days) (time to communicate fix)
• Annual work time for employees ... check this link. For the US it is 1,790 hours per year
• Average hourly cost (simplified) for the person fixing the issue: $60,000 / 1790 hours per year = $33.52 per hour 
• Average hourly cost (simplified) for the person communicating the issue to the fix: $50,000 / 1790 hours per year = $27.93 per hour
• Final numbers: 
• 500 hrs x $33.52 = $16,760.00  (Cost to fix issue)
• 333 hrs x $27.93 = $9,300.69 (Cost to communicate fix)
• Total cost = $26,060.69 Total cost savings amount. This needs to accompany your IT POR requirement 
• NOTE: This does not include customer satisfaction challenges (e.g. customer retention etc.) or the cost of fixing this issue (you need a cost benefit analysis for that). 

Next time you work on your business requirements follow this idea to increase your chances to actually get your requirements approved. It should help you to think more thoroughly about your requirements and hence come up with better data to justify the requirement.