Warning: long post, TL;DR below
Never say never – especially to the management!
So in Q1 this stupid OKR was set to "reduce running costs by 10% by the end of the year" by a management who doesn’t have any idea how things work in IT. They complain that we have too many subscriptions, claiming that surely there are a few that aren't essential, without even knowing which tool does what. At the end of the day, it's more about workplace politics than facing the reality so we had to keep that OKR and "see what we can do." (rolling_eyes)
I started thinking (googling) about my options to achieve more process efficiency and cost optimization. After searching through blogs, subreddits and lots of clickbait, I came across an post about using the right tools correctly to improve your processes. It was a complete sales pitch, but it still made some very valid points about saving time and money in IT and processes. In summary, it basically says this: you can get real insights on your costs and increase efficiency only if you are using the right tools for your needs and if you are using them right. That sounded fair and catchy enough so I started following the steps it pointed out. And here are what I did:
The first thing I checked was if we were in control of the data. I asked the financial team if they had some kind of IT inventory for all of our software and SaaS services that we use across all teams. It turns out it was just a mess of outdated Excel sheets, emails, and invoices from vendors here and there. I actually wondered how we survived until now in all this chaos. As this perfect chaos triggered my OCD, I took the time to sort out everything, and that was probably the most time-consuming and dreadful task I’ve done in a long time. In the end my goals were to:
a) gather information on all the tools/services we use, and
b) map each tool according to their purpose and its user groups, and
c) attaching additional information like running costs, importance or the people responsible for it.
The other challenge was to find a tool that fitted my needs which wasn’t Excel and wasn't a full-blown software asset management tool, because those “all-in-one” services are way too expensive and have too many fancy features that we actually don’t use or need.
Once I was done with the work, I was able to analyze our situation. And here are the amazing highlights of the day::
- I found out that one of the software we were still paying for was completely obsolete and had been replaced by an extension of an enterprise service. No one had ever thought of letting us know. Mindblown..
- I was able to reduce the number of licenses for three (!) different SaaS services as I learned we were paying for the ghosts of long-gone employees and no team was bothered to continue seeing their inactive accounts. An “Offboarding 101” workshop for the teams is on the way.
- I realized we were paying thousands of bucks for an all-in-one productivity tool and people were actually using only one or two of those tens of fancy functions. Instead, it seems they simply used free online tools. In other words, adoption ratio was quite low.
That impossible yearly OKR? With these optimisations already achieved in Q2. You think you are in control of your resources and processes and one simple sales pitch post proves you wrong. Lessons learned. It was incredible to see I had no idea how much optimisation potential our processes had. And I am already working on next steps: Now although everything is optimized and all our data is tidied and organized, I still feel I can find some alternative ways to document, track and keep this data up to date all the time. For one, I’m planning to invest some time to collect software usage data automatically via API scripts to document the effectiveness / ROI of the software we are using.
Sorry for the long post but I thought maybe some of you here could also benefit from what I learned. Here is a TL;DR for my fellow admins with ADHD:
TL;DR: Management wanted to cut running costs by 10%, told them impossible. Found some very basic but effective tips to get a central overview of all tools, their costs and usage and was mindblown to see how much money we were burning for nothing. Yearly OKR already achieved in Q2, will probably overachieve in the following months.