Graham has moved through tech since around 1990 from running a software company, project management, managing IT investment and several spells consulting. In New Zealand he has run the IT project team for Carter Holt Harvey and managed large capex budgets at Spark, each over about 6 years. He worked for the UK's NCC Services (was National Computing Centre) consulting to UK government and business entities.
His main interest is in the 'why?" of IT, generating reliable evidence to support making excellent choices.
Benefits are often the hardest aspect of a business case to pin down. They include speculation, but how can you move from wishful thinking to evidence based without spending a lot on research?
When an organisation has been operating for a while, its business systems become more complex. You know intuitively that complexity hurts business agility and increases operational cost- but how do you measure complexity, and assign cost to it, so you can include the benefit of reduced complexity in a business case?
This presentation describes two complementary, evidence-based techniques to put supportable numbers on benefits, including reducing those wicked complexity costs. These techniques also help identify critical risks to project success.