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How to Reduce the Complexity of your IT Projects

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John Tailor
How to Reduce the Complexity of your IT Projects

Running a business can be quite costly. That’s why you might be looking for ways to reduce the cost of your operations and save some money. One of the ideas you might be looking into is reducing the complexity of your IT projects and scrape some money that way. If you manage to do it properly, you might be looking at a reduction of your IT staff expenses and a better deal with your suppliers. That being said, it might be a good idea for you to take a look at three phases of reducing the complexity of your IT projects.

Phase 1: Doing an Immediate Cleanup

In the first phase, it’ll be up to you to identify the most obvious targets and make quick cost reductions that will make it easier for you to save money. Firstly, you should try to reevaluate your software licenses. This means you should think about how necessary all of your licenses really are and retire those you don’t really need. An alternative to retiring the licenses you no longer have any use for is trying to renegotiate and get a better deal for your business. The next step is to cancel all the projects that don’t meet your standards. This can be done by sorting all of your projects according to their value and cancelling the ones that are irrelevant for your business. Lastly, you should aim at decommissioning the applications you rarely use. Think about the applications you’ve used during the past you and cut all those who don’t make the list.

Phase 2: Making it simple

The second phase is where you actually reduce the complexity of your IT architecture. There are plenty of levers you can think about using during this phase. First of all, you should try to adopt less customization with your projects. Too many IT projects fail, simply due to excessive customization and trying to come up with new options. On the other hand, if you use out-of-the-box solutions in most of the cases and only turn to customization when necessary, you’ll be scraping away a lot of money. Another thing you’ll have to do if you want to make your IT projects simpler is to encourage reuse. There are just too many companies out there who spend their IT resources on reinventing the wheel. So, take a look at your current projects and try to find solutions that can be reused in order to make your future projects less complex. Also, you should aim at outsourcing your IT tasks to a third-party vendor, specialized in cloud IT support. This way, you’ll be able to focus your time and energy on your core business.

Phase 3: Making big changes

The third and most ambitious phase of your IT architecture transformation is all about making big changes. A lot of business owners run a global business but fail to develop a truly global IT architecture. If you think this might be the case with you, it’s the right time to take a closer look at the level of sourcing, consolidation, harmonization, and governance in your IT operating model. A review like this might help you come up with new and more efficient IT architecture. All the changes you make during this phase are also going to have a huge effect on the way your business will be run in the future. For example, by investing in new tools and processes, you can accelerate your product development or increase your productivity. And changes like this can help you stand out from the crowd for years to come.


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John Tailor
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