Innovate - View everything from a total lifecycle cost perspective
We should all be doing what we love, but there are still some practicalities to get us there, and one big challenge I faced was considering cost over the lifetime of a system. It took a lot of practice. But it does stop you from making dumb, short-term-cheap, long-term-expensive decisions. I recently lost a battle at work when from a purely hardware standpoint I could overhaul and replace a platform for the same one-year cost as extending maintenance and support by one year. However, with new hardware the customer wanted the latest version of the software; not an unreasonable request, but one that was going to require additional licensing, professional services and some selling. So the one-time upgrade price was presented at four times the cost of renewing the maintenance. They completely ignored the associated software cost, but the lifecycle costing model forces you to factor it in up front! It almost makes you consider the life expectancy of the system. How many legacy systems do you have in places years later, after you threw together a quick fix? If you had known then what you knew now, would you have changed how you tackled the issue? Remember, we should increasingly be factoring systems to change and adapt, not live for eternity. Looking at the project from a lifecycle cost can help keep you focused.
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