DailyPost 903
THE IT COSTING CONUNDRUM
With product development, customisation, services infrastructure & delivery costs coming down considerably with usage of matured code libraries, cheaper storage, humongous computational power etc reasonable/ available tech upgrade, cloud services etc, the costing still remains a huge challenge for the Indian customers. Has the number of resources come down considerably per project, has the cost of production of software come down, are projects / products being delivered faster, are the famous IT enterprise’s benches still there, are customers satisfied phenomenally more with the services, are service engineers / resources delivering much more per unit cost etc. Has the IT landscape transformed?
If the answer is no, then nothing much has changed. The effort, time and cost calculation remains where it was. The costing does not factor in the expertise of the resource but for years on job, there is no clarity in what is being paid to the employee and what is the company’s cut, the customer does not even know whether the resource belongs to the company or is outsourced.
The Project Manager remains the more harried person and is squarely responsible for that project account. The supposedly available support systems are basically to extract their share of salaries and company’s operations cost, out of that project. In the agile IT enabled organisations and robots taking over mass retail spaces to manufacturing, the Indian IT landscape can boast of the heaviest resource load, the on boarding goes on. The manual body shopping program goes unabated.
The pre – sales to sales, marketing, production, warranty, bill collectors, corporate communications, advertising and all the flab keep increasing rather than decreasing and then the capital cost and operations of the huge glass and chrome structures. What is core? The different teams do not work in tandem, softwares may provide some connect, but resources and expertise don’t. The company does not do any impact analysis of the deliverables. Only signatures and ’completion’ counts.
COSTING CANNOT BE GET PRECEDENCE OVER THE PROJECT ITSELF.
Sanjay Sahay