Corporate GTD: Recognizing What Not To Do

Everyone out there who reads blogs regularly is probably familiar with the Getting Things Done phenomena, or GTD.  A lot of people are saying that it’s changing their lives; I’m going to tell you one way it can change your company.

One of the key premises of GTD is recognizing what not to do.  By determining what tasks are not important, you free up time.  By choosing correctly what not to buy, you free up money for yourself.  Reducing and minimizing your life to the essentials allows you to focus on the essentials and get them done better, faster, and easier.

What if you apply this thinking to your IT group?

Research shows that the typical company nowadays is spending 70-80% or more of their IT budget on maintenance, rather than growing and adding to the company.  This is bad, because it keeps your company from accomplishing new projects that help it grow.

But how did you get to this spot?  All of that maintenance is for projects that you did in the past.  Were all of them worth it?  What about now?  How many of your products in maintenance are more valuable than your future projects?  For that matter, how many of your future projects are worth the maintenance costs in the long run? 

The stark reality of corporate management, and in turn, IT management, is that no project that saves the company money is free to either implement or maintain.  Maintenance costs money, and the company has limits.  You must evaluate both existing products and future projects not just based on how much they cost in dollars.  Companies have so much money per year and that’s it.  IT gets a percentage of that, and each project in maintenance mode gets a percentage of that.  You only have so much to go around.

What I’m suggesting is this:  change how you evaluate projects.  Try evaluating it based on the resources you have and the utility you give up in doing it:

• What percentage of of the corporation’s money and resources does it save annually?
• What percentage of IT’s money and resources does it take up annually?
• What projects can I not do or not maintain if I do this project?
• Is the savings significant enough that I am willing to cut something else if need be do to this?
• Are they significant enough to increase IT’s budget if need be to maintain it?

Remember- every moment that your IT department is implementing a project or maintaining an existing system, it is not doing something else for you.  The cost is more than dollars and cents.  Recognize what to do at an organizational level.

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