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Profit center all the way. It's true for any job in any industry. > Most finance folk are more amenable when the problem can be simplified to "if you give mone

Profit center all the way. It's true for any job in any industry. > Most finance folk are more amenable when the problem can be simplified to "if you give money; we'll make more of it" This is or should be leadership in general. It's just business acumen 101. > mired in politics and backroom dealing It's usually just a sorting of all possible decisions. What you don't see is how 10x of available budget dollars is being asked for by various departments that have no clear financial ROI and someone has to decide which investments to fund and what can wait. IT as a cost center can usually wait.

sangnoir 5y ago
> This is or should be leadership in general. It's just business acumen 101. My point is that they can be short-sighted by seeing value in things that directly generate money, which is the opposite of acumen. Things like "We'll halve the wait time on help-desk tickets, making everyone more productive" or "We need an additional storage array, we're almost at capacity and need head-room" are not money-makers, but the finance folk at some organizations treat it like it's your personal pet project that you have to grovel for.
- conductr 5y ago
  > finance folk at some organizations treat it like it's your personal pet project that you have to grovel for. It is your burden of proof though. You have to convince decision makers why your project deserves funding. Nobody in life just blindly gives out funds. Finance can be your biggest champion if you help us understand the cost/benefits. > Things like "We'll halve the wait time on help-desk tickets, making everyone more productive" This takes shape in many forms and it’s a fallacy of some sort. Is being more productive even the goal? The goal is to maximize productivity with current resources. You validly use lack of investment as a reason productivity has a ceiling (and should). But, likely it’s a substantial investment needed to halve wait times. And that’s money that almost always has a better use. Eg. Spend $500K to save $500k on labor Vs Spend $500K on marketing to make $1M in recurring revenue
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    > It is your burden of proof though. You have to convince decision makers why your project deserves funding. Nobody in life just blindly gives out funds. Finance can be your biggest champion if you help us understand the cost/benefits. That is all true, and my way of playing the meta-game and flipping the risks to finance is working in Profit-center departments only. "The storage array is about to get full, and if it does, everything will grind to a halt and we'll make no money until its fixed" means the burden of proof is now on the finance person, and if they refuse and our APIs start 500'ing because of it, I'll have my paper trail ready. Fuck working in cost centers. > This takes shape in many forms and it’s a fallacy of some sort. Is being more productive even the goal? The answer to you question is yes, that is a goal for the helpdesk to resolve issues faster when users are complaining that the wait times are too long, especially when it's the pencil-pushers in finance who want to jump queue because "everything they work on is important and time-sensitive" and deserves to be a P0. For the modest amount required to buy a midrange, off-the-self replacement mail server, we could avoided half the tickets that were email related (server was very old, and we suspected it had bad memory, and of course we had no backup server - that would be expensive)
    - conductr 5y ago
      I hear you. Corporate finance itself is generally always a cost center. We operate on shit software and it’s a reason we pretty much try use Excel for everything. It’s the only decent software we have. The two cases you mentioned do have drastically different risk profiles. One wipes up the company’s revenues and the other just loses email. It’s like comparing certain death to a broken toe. And I’d take a broken toe if it saves my life every day of the week. When budget dollars are limited these two things can be mutually exclusive. Also, it could be 1) the company is trying to sale and but hold on all infrastructure purchases 2) the company is in talks to outsource the help desk 3) any number of things that finance knows confidentially. I’ll leave it there. My point is, yes it seems difficult to get things approved. Plead your case in terms of cost/benefits and risk financially, operationally, and relatively to your teams goal. Accept “no” as leadership taking all the information you’ve shared and still deciding they were ok accepting the risk you brought to their attention.

sangnoir 5y ago

> This is or should be leadership in general. It's just business acumen 101. My point is that they can be short-sighted by seeing value in things that directly generate money, which is the opposite of acumen. Things like "We'll halve the wait time on help-desk tickets, making everyone more productive" or "We need an additional storage array, we're almost at capacity and need head-room" are not money-makers, but the finance folk at some organizations treat it like it's your personal pet project that you have to grovel for.

conductr 5y ago
> finance folk at some organizations treat it like it's your personal pet project that you have to grovel for. It is your burden of proof though. You have to convince decision makers why your project deserves funding. Nobody in life just blindly gives out funds. Finance can be your biggest champion if you help us understand the cost/benefits. > Things like "We'll halve the wait time on help-desk tickets, making everyone more productive" This takes shape in many forms and it’s a fallacy of some sort. Is being more productive even the goal? The goal is to maximize productivity with current resources. You validly use lack of investment as a reason productivity has a ceiling (and should). But, likely it’s a substantial investment needed to halve wait times. And that’s money that almost always has a better use. Eg. Spend $500K to save $500k on labor Vs Spend $500K on marketing to make $1M in recurring revenue
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > It is your burden of proof though. You have to convince decision makers why your project deserves funding. Nobody in life just blindly gives out funds. Finance can be your biggest champion if you help us understand the cost/benefits. That is all true, and my way of playing the meta-game and flipping the risks to finance is working in Profit-center departments only. "The storage array is about to get full, and if it does, everything will grind to a halt and we'll make no money until its fixed" means the burden of proof is now on the finance person, and if they refuse and our APIs start 500'ing because of it, I'll have my paper trail ready. Fuck working in cost centers. > This takes shape in many forms and it’s a fallacy of some sort. Is being more productive even the goal? The answer to you question is yes, that is a goal for the helpdesk to resolve issues faster when users are complaining that the wait times are too long, especially when it's the pencil-pushers in finance who want to jump queue because "everything they work on is important and time-sensitive" and deserves to be a P0. For the modest amount required to buy a midrange, off-the-self replacement mail server, we could avoided half the tickets that were email related (server was very old, and we suspected it had bad memory, and of course we had no backup server - that would be expensive)
  - conductr 5y ago
    I hear you. Corporate finance itself is generally always a cost center. We operate on shit software and it’s a reason we pretty much try use Excel for everything. It’s the only decent software we have. The two cases you mentioned do have drastically different risk profiles. One wipes up the company’s revenues and the other just loses email. It’s like comparing certain death to a broken toe. And I’d take a broken toe if it saves my life every day of the week. When budget dollars are limited these two things can be mutually exclusive. Also, it could be 1) the company is trying to sale and but hold on all infrastructure purchases 2) the company is in talks to outsource the help desk 3) any number of things that finance knows confidentially. I’ll leave it there. My point is, yes it seems difficult to get things approved. Plead your case in terms of cost/benefits and risk financially, operationally, and relatively to your teams goal. Accept “no” as leadership taking all the information you’ve shared and still deciding they were ok accepting the risk you brought to their attention.