Agile Cloud Institute

Cross-Functional Architecture And Tools For Cloud-Based Operating Models

Quantifying the Financial Benefits

It is free to use the Agile Cloud Manager for commercial projects, as long as you abide by the terms of the license. But you will need to devote engineering resources to implementing the Agile Cloud Manager, so this article will discuss how to get a budget for engineering projects.

Business Case Step Within Governance Process

Your governance process can include a step at which business cases are developed to assess the financial benefit that could be derived from each implementation of the Agile Cloud Manager within your organization.

Each business case can take the form of a spreadsheet comparing financial cost line items between the present state of using existing systems versus the future state of using the Agile Cloud Manager for each system.

Business case development is a cross-functional process that engages people in multiple departments including finance, architecture, engineering, and others.

Components of Business Cases

The components of business cases are specific to each unique organization, but as a starting point, your cross-functional teams can use the following line items to begin to quantify the ongoing financial costs before and after migrating each type of service and system into orchestration by the Agile Cloud Manager:

Your process for evaluating business cases will include unique line items that are specific to your organization and will evolve over time. But the above bullet points can be a starting point as you start to assess the financial benefits.

Hypothetical Example

A hypothetical example of building a business case might be as follows:

If your organization currently has five implementations of a specific type of storage service, you might reduce that to two re-usable software-definitions of the same storage service orchestrated by the Agile Cloud Manager. Each of your two remaining software definitions might be dedicated to a specific different cloud provider, such as having an AWS definition and an Azure definition.

Your organization might have hundreds of implementations of a given type of service, but this is intended to be a simplified example.

The financial impact of consolidating five implementations into two software definitions might be quantified as follows:

We recommend reallocating saved engineering costs to redeploy the same engineers to work on new projects that can increase the organization’s agility and accelerate the company’s growth.

A 30% increase in productivity in your IT organization on a cash-over-cash basis could therefore result from implementing the Agile Cloud Manager for each use case in the hypothetical example given above.

Estimating Organization-Wide Financial Benefits

The total extent of benefit for your organization could be estimated as follows:

How much would a 10% increase in the overall productivity of your IT organization be worth?

How much would a 20% increase in the overall productivity of your IT organization be worth?

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