When to Outsource Project Management

If you have an IT project coming up and you’re preparing a business case to present to senior management, give serious consideration to adding a line item for outsourcing overall management of the project.

Maybe you’re thinking the budget won’t accommodate the “added cost”. Or, perhaps you’re confident that your staff possess the skill sets required to plan, design, manage, and implement the entire project. The consultants at WAKE Technology Services, Inc. have dozen of cases that prove you could be very wrong on both counts.

The Engagement

A most recent experience involved an IT project with The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. WAKE had been retained to conduct a fairly routine data center survey. Not routine was the fact that CHOP was also in the early stages of a major overhaul of their data storage system. Early in the sense that they had not yet completed the RFP, but late in the sense that it had already taken 8 months, and consumed hundreds of man-hours, yet they had very little to show for their time and effort.

To blame were numerous disagreements between the staff charged with developing the RFP. Which vendors to leave in, which to leave out. Which requirements to leave in, which to leave out. There was an impasse and no one was budging.

Since WAKE was already on site, the VP of IT decided to have WAKE’s Gene Kern conduct an evaluation of the RFP process with the hopes of getting the project on track.

Actions Taken

WAKE immediately proceeded to take ownership of the entire RFP process; from identifying specific requirements to overseeing the ultimate implementation.Drawing from their extensive experience with similar IT projects, the WAKE consultants orchestrated the bid process, managed all vendor communications and negotiations, and selected the vendor.

WAKE also made significant contributions to the design of the new architecture, and assisted in consolidations involving servers, storage disks, various versions of operating systems, and the provisioning of physical servers to virtual machines.

Contributions that Minimized the Solution’s TCO

While WAKE made numerous contributions that enhanced the project’s overall ROI, the most dramatic was compressing the time to bring the project online. Ordinarily, a project of this magnitude and complexity – 44 terabytes of useable storage - would take four weeks for the RFP process, 3 months for negotiations and another 3 months for implementation. WAKE had the new storage online in 6 weeks!

While IBM was initially eliminated in the early stages by a CHOP staffer, WAKE brought them back into the bidding process due in part to their in-house virtualization solution. As it turned out, WAKE selected IBM, based partially on their recent release of their DS storage series. WAKE was also aware that the other two vendors – HP and EMC – had upgrades scheduled for release within six months after the CHOP implementation would have been completed. CHOP would have spent considerable money and experienced unacceptable downtime to install the latest upgrades.

WAKE also recommended a clustered solution to minimize the number of single points of failure in the SAN and maximize the chance to achieve the 7x24x365 uptime requirement. Only IBM’s solution supported clustering. And, an added bonus, IBM’s storage architecture was also the only one that allowed for maintenance without bringing the system down.

Contributions that Maximized the Project’s ROI

Before WAKE was retained to review the status of the RFP process, the lowest preliminary vendor bid came in at $2.8 million. With the infusion of WAKE’s technical expertise and project management experience, the final price tag for the entire project came in at $1.4 million. Quite a bargain for 44 terabytes of storage.

And the savings didn’t end there. WAKE employed their well-honed negotiation skills and obtained a full year of free maintenance on all equipment, valued between $70,000 and $80,000.

Think You Can’t Afford to Outsource Project Management?

Maybe you can’t afford not to. Consider the tangible, bottom-line benefits realized by CHOP:

  • A new storage system online more than six months earlier than normal time frames
  • A project cost savings of 100% attributable to WAKE’s direct involvement
  • Another $70,000 savings of first year maintenance expenses

Before you present the business case for your next IT project to senior management, call WAKE. While there is no guarantee your potential savings will match those CHOP experienced, there’s an excellent chance that the time you spend finding out will be your project’s first major cost saving task.