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Calculating the Cost of Conversion

Calculating the Cost of Conversion. By De Murr For STC Wisconsin Chapter November 11, 2009. About Me. 30 years in Technical Communication (16 in management) STC Fellow (2005) Chapter Achievement Award Houston San Fernando Valley Ozaukee County Master Gardener

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Calculating the Cost of Conversion

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  1. Calculating the Cost of Conversion By De Murr For STC Wisconsin Chapter November 11, 2009

  2. About Me • 30 years in Technical Communication (16 in management) • STC Fellow (2005) • Chapter Achievement Award • Houston • San Fernando Valley • Ozaukee County Master Gardener • Golden Retriever Rescue of Wisconsin

  3. Overview • What is Conversion? • Parts of the Conversion • Costs of Conversion

  4. Conversion • Currency • Imperial vs. Metric • Religion • Left/Right-hand Drive • Software • System/Process

  5. Process to change the process • The ultimate five questions • Why • What • Who • When • How

  6. Reason for Change (Why) • What is the point of pain?* • Who do you need to sell? • Can you tie the point of pain to a company goal championed by a “C-type”? * Kotter, John P. and Dan S. Cohen, The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations, 2002.

  7. Purpose and Scope (What) • Review CMMI score (Capability Maturity Model Integration)* • Outline the benefits • Your department • Other department • Detail the scope of the change *Hackos, JoAnn, Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People, 2007.

  8. Roles and Responsibilities (Who) • Roles • Organization Contacts (POCs) • Project Advocate • Project Manager • People doing the actual conversion tasks, including testers • Outside contractors/consultants • Responsibilities • Job descriptions

  9. Schedules (When) • Required tasks in chronological order • Start and end times for conversion and implementation • Tasks must reflect any dependencies • Milestones • Conflicts

  10. Project Plan (How) • List EVERYTHING! • Tasks to be done before the conversion • Detail major tasks • Don’t forget… • Testing • Training • Security

  11. Seven Laws of Projects • A major project never completes on time, within budget, or with the original team, and never does exactly what the original plan stated. • Projects progress quickly until they become 85% complete. Then they remain 85% complete forever. Think of this as the Home Improvement Law.

  12. Seven Laws of Project (continued) • When things appear to be going well, you’ve overlook something. When things can’t get worse, the will. (Murphy’s Law says, “If something can go wrong, it will.”) • Project teams hate weekly progress reports because they so vividly manifest the lack of progress.

  13. Seven Laws of Project (continued) • A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected. A carefully planned project only take twice as long as expected. (Ten estimators will estimate the same work in ten different ways. And one estimator will estimate ten different ways at ten different times.)

  14. Seven Laws of Project (continued) • The greater the project’s technical complexity, the less you need a technician to manage it. • If you have too few people on a project, they can’t solve the problems. If you have too many, they create more problems than they can solve. — Matthew E. May, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing

  15. Cost of Conversion • Material costs (such as, software, hardware, additional physical space, office supplies, office equipment) • Time to convert (regular time and overtime) • Emotional ownership of the system being replaced • Others affected by the conversion

  16. Manage the Books • Is your department a cost center? • Share cost with another group? • Count as capital investment? • Depreciated hardware • Capital project • Defray cost over accounting years? • ROI (Return on Investment) or reduce cost of deliverables?

  17. Build a Spread Sheet • Hardware • Software • Labor Hours • Testing Hours • Management Hours • Implementation Hours • Training Hours • Material Costs

  18. What else? • Contracts with vendors • Does it meet your need? • Who has to sign? • Who has to review? • Outside labor resources • Outsource one-time tasks • Does my schedule reflect when to bring in these resources? • Food for people working overtime

  19. Legacy Systems/Documents • Do you have to convert the documents or the data? • Do you have to convert all of it? • Can you go live without the legacy stuff?

  20. De Murrdemurr@wi.rr.com262.243.5008 Contact Information

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