Neil Neely wrote: > Cost saving ideas: > #1) Vendor management: Reduce costs for service X by either changing > provider or renegotiating the price for X from the current provider. > One idea that I've used in the past is to move our hardware/software support to a tiered system. At one point, we had all of our servers on platinum-type support levels.. 24x7, 2 hr response time. Due to history we had dozens of support contracts with the same vendors. It was initially billed as a cost savings because we could have a single contract, you would always use the same contract number, and the vendor wouldn't have to spend time figuring out whether a particular box was part of one contract or another, so could give us an overall cheaper rate. After we worked with that for a couple of years, we figured out we could cut back to a 12x5, 4 hr response as our standard and have an exception contract for real critical servers that would be 24x7,2. We also set up a T&M account with the vendor, so that if someone called in with a server that was not on the critical list, they could still request critical support and justify it later.
> #3) Finding things that have really high annual costs and seeing if > there is a different way to do them (get rid of it, go FOSS, etc) > Looking the other way, you might be surprised at the number of "low hanging fruit" and "quick hits" that you can find that don't have high annual costs individually, but may add up. One contract I had awhile back had a distributed IT organization, where every business group paid their own way (often due to M&A activity). We were finally starting to centralize the networking group and found out that the company was paying something on the order of $200k per month for various sized WAN links (T1s, T3s, ISDN, etc). Even worse, we found that about $75k per month of that was for unused links that had never been canceled, the lines had just been terminated under the floor or at the network panel. As we continued the audit, we determined that alot of the WAN links were direct connections to partners and service provides, many of which had started to offer encrypted tunneling over the Internet negating the need for the direct connection. > Unpleasant ideas: > #1) Merge teams to achieve efficiencies (Read: double the workload on > one team and lay off most of the other team) > This doesn't have to be unpleasant. You can often find efficiencies through team organization that will allow you to retain all employees, but reassign them to different positions that may even expand your ability to provide service and increase revenue. At a previous company, we centralized our SA staff, dividing people into several different functions (production support SAs, project based SAs, higher level architects, etc. We were able to focus the architects on really understanding our environment and figuring out the next steps to improving the environment (where could we combine services, what systems had reached end of useful life and needed to be upgraded). The project SAs were then tasks with building the new environments and doing the consolidation work. The line SAs were able to focus on day-to-day activities and improving the existing systems through patching, installing monitoring, security remediation, etc. We actually ended up with a net increase in staff, but significantly lower TCO and operational costs. > #2) Fortnight's - work 9 days every 2 weeks with a 10% pay cut > #3) Pay cut's > Any way you slice it, a pay cut is a pay cut. > #4) Layoff's > Consider location strategy too. It may mean laying off people in very expensive areas (such as NYC or Silicon Valley) and moving those functions to more cost effective locations in the central and southern states. My current big bank employer (the only one that seems to be doing "reasonably" well right now), found we could save 25%-40% (depending) by relocating a position from NYC to Columbus, Ohio without sacrificing skillset (often improving). We found this to be particularly true with contractors, who in high income areas are often ridiculously overpriced ($200-300/h or more for a developer, when I can hire them all day long in Columbus for $65-80). -spp _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
