WisHList Newsletter July 2008

Dear clients and colleagues, 

We are very excited to introduce our brand new monthly newsletter to you.  W.W.W. – WisHList’s Wonderful World – will be your monthly serving of brain food. Through short, sharp, savvy articles we will keep you up to date with developments in the IT industry relevant to your business, while also giving you a glimpse of our internal goings-on.

Through W.W.W. we hope to enhance the service you receive from us. 

The newsletter gives us the space to touch on matters we don’t always have time to bring to your attention during project interactions, but which could be of real value to your business. 

If you want us to cover a specific topic of theme, please drop the editor, Charmain Lines, well, a line: charmain.h@mweb.co.za.

Here’s to us all growing wiser together!

Avril Howes and Neville Levinthal

Contents List

• To spend or not to spend in tough times?
• PM power tips: create a project charter
• WisHlistXFactor: Estell Louw
• Wishing Well

IT Skills: To spend or not to spend in tough times?project charter:

In the same vein, there are professional investors who know that the time to buy is when other people are selling, and the time to sell is when other people are buying. This may seem like a counterintuitive approach, but it’s done wonders for the likes of Warren Buffet, America’s most successful investor. These are people who have consistently employed this approach, and it’s helped make many of them very, very rich.

Moving in the opposite direction of the crowd is not something that makes sense for every organisation, nor is it a guarantee of success. But it is something you ought to consider.

Here’s how IT can help you in tough times:

• Invest in software solutions like business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) to make better, faster business decisions and squeeze more profit from your existing operations. 
• Deploying collaboration and remote meeting solutions to reduce travel costs without sacrificing creativity and team synergy.
• Hosted solutions and cloud computing with their vastly lower capital investment requirements can help you capitalize on cost-effective ways of helping your business become more efficient, while positioning it to emerge stronger and more profitable when the good economic times return.
   

There are other angles to work when the economy goes into recession. You can cut a better deal with software vendors in a recession, a time when they’re especially hungry for your business. With many companies, some undoubtedly your competitors, letting IT staff go, there’s an opportunity to scoop up some excellent talent that simply wouldn’t be available if the economy was good.

The bottom line is pretty clear: under-investing in IT can lead to poor customer service, lost business, and a lack of productivity – none of which is good for business.
Just because it’s so commonly done doesn’t make cutting or freezing IT spending in a recession the right course of action for you. In bad times as in good, there are opportunities waiting to be found. Assuming that your organisation’s circumstances don’t absolutely prevent it, you just have to be willing to buck the trends and find them.

Adapted from a blog by Larry Blitz.

Want to improve your project success? The best way to ensure success is to define your project clearly from the outset. That way, all of your stakeholders will have a single view of what the project needs to achieve. And the best way to define your project clearly is to create a project charter. 

• is completed at the very start of the project life cycle;
• sets out the project vision, objectives and scope; and
• describes the deliverables, the people involved in producing them and the timeframes for delivery.

• gain agreement from the sponsor first
• use clear, meaningful words
• communicate it to all team members