Pro tip: Budgeting is way more fun when you use lots of colors!
No, it’s really not. But it does make you budget more for ink.
For just about the past decade, I have spent time volunteering to teach some classes on personal financial basics a couple of times a year. We don’t cover anything that complex; just simple things like what debt is, how to think through purchasing decisions, how to balance a checkbook, a little bit about insurance, and perhaps the most important topic: budgeting. We spend multiple weeks on why it’s important to budget, how to build one, and how to live on it. The class has been well received by attendees, and they thank me for covering something they feel like they should have been taught much earlier in life. Not to editorialize too much, but it still amazes me that we turn 18-year-old kids out into the world after high school and just hope that their parents or some other trusted source has taught them how to handle finances.
In our classes, when we’re covering why to budget I spend quite a bit of time trying to help folks define what a budget is. We run through multiple definitions as I’ve learned that there isn’t only one definition that makes the importance of living on a budget “click” for everyone. However, there is one definition that I like the most and think does the best job of describing the criticality of a budget. I like to define the budget as a prioritized plan for your money. The general idea is that you allocate funds based on their importance and priority – the more important something is to you, such as rent the higher it should be. What’s important here is that the same things or categories can vary widely in their importance to different people. In fact, just today I was in a text thread talking about grills. For some people, spending $1250 on a grill is an obvious decision because having an excellent grill is an important thing to them. Me? I bought the $250 grill at Home Depot and it’s just fine – grilling isn’t a way of life for me and I have other priorities, so I budget for my grill accordingly. The same can be said about cars, videogames, and cable TV; everyone prioritizes these things differently based on their importance to them – there isn’t a universally right answer.
I was recently thinking about financial budgets and how we prioritize different activities both at home and in the office. Fundamentally, the exact same planning process occurs in both instances – higher priority items, projects, or categories are funded before the lower priority projects. As an example, I’m sure you’ve been in a budget conversation before – or have at least heard about them from someone who has – where two ideas were being advocated for and only one was able to be funded. Simply put, the conversation that was happening was a team (or manager) deciding what projects were a higher priority to the organization and then funding the higher priority items based on a scarcity of resources – in this case financials resources (money.)
I can’t tell if this guy is climbing out of the wall, or if the clock is installed on a table.
What has interested me recently though is how we apply this process to other finite resources, and the most finite resource I can think of is time. It doesn’t matter how you beg, borrow, or steal – you simply can’t create more time. As individuals that means we need to budget – or have a prioritized plan for - our time so that we make the maximum use of it. Businesses are a little different in that they can create more time (hours of labor) by hiring more people. Still, that ultimately equates to more dollars and therefore needs to be managed appropriately. You’ve heard people say that “time is money” and in a business that isn’t just hyperbole – it’s the literal state of things. The business that you work for is paying for every hour of every person that is working there, so the time really does have a price tag attached to it.
These two topics of budgeting (time and money) intersect for me very often. Very often as a leader, I need to find a balance between spending financial resources and spending human resources to accomplish a task. This is one of the reasons that I (and many other organizations) have leveraged managed services, consultants, and some amount of outsourcing. Of course, very often I hear an argument that the costs of hiring these firms or individuals are incredibly high – and if you just look at dollars it may very well be the case. I have had multiple debates with technologists both on my work team and those that I know from the community about the cost of outsourcing and other time-saving financial expenses and their value. Ultimately, it comes down to priorities: is it more important to do something on the cheap financially even if it ties up the team for months, or incur the expense and be up and running quickly and allow the existing team to do something else in the meantime?
One place this debate raged for a while is in hyperconverged infrastructure. The argument from vendors selling such platforms is that you can be up and running in just a few hours or minutes and not need to expend the effort bringing multiple infrastructure components online, integrating them, and then managing them as discrete entities. Instead, you can just have this one device that does everything you need, and patching and management is all integrated into a single console. I know lots of technologists who have used such technology and think that it’s great to use but that it is too expensive. What they aren’t seeing is that by purchasing a product like this, I can have the person who used to manage the storage environment move on to something else that provides more direct value to our stakeholders than just managing LUNs. Also, we can be up on new infrastructure in less than a quarter of the time of a component-by-component upgrade or migration.
Nothing says “hyperconverged” like a picture of the CompuServe datacenter, amirite?
I know that for many of my readers that are well-versed in this market this is rudimentary - even remedial - but I was recently in a back-and-forth with a CIO who simply didn’t get this. All they could see were the dollar signs, and not the ultimate value of being able to not spend so much time worrying about the silicon keeping the apps running. Instead, a team can be spending more time and cycles on the apps that are providing real value to the business. I was getting exasperated and finally asked pointedly, “How many of the line-of-business people that you support have asked you in the past year what your storage latency is or what your CPU overhead is for IO encryption?” Of course, the answer was a sheepish “none.” Realizing I was on the verge of making my point I continued; “And how many have asked you about app modifications or improvements to support the work they’re doing?” Of course, the answer this time was plenty. The point I was making was that the priority of the organization was not (and likely should not be) on the hardware or infrastructure platform that’s running the applications in question. Instead, the priority is the application itself and therefore it’s IT’s job to make sure as much time as possible is spent on those apps - not on the servers running them.
You can think of the mental exercises involved in deciding whether to spend money or staff resources as “trading dollars for hours or bandwidth.” In my opinion, the most obvious example of trading dollars for bandwidth is using a cloud provider or software as a service. I’ve not once been able to find an example of where it’s less expensive to run a database in the cloud vs spinning it up on MySQL on a server in my data center. However, that all takes time. I’d need to build the server, get MySQL installed and configured, and then build my database… blah blah blah. In the cloud, I click on a button and I have a database ready for my tables. Yes, it costs more, but it costs more in the same way that having someone come and power wash your house costs more than doing it yourself with a bucket and a scrub brush. That brush, bucket, and cleaner may only cost you $25, but you lost your whole weekend – not unlike managing MySQL come to think of it.
I’ll wrap up like this: if you’re in a position to decide whether you’re going to throw staff time towards something, make sure you’re budgeting it the same way that you would budget dollars – based on priority to the organization. And remember that you can often find extra funds throughout the course of a budget cycle through various means, but you can almost never find extra staff or extra hours that were not planned for well in advance. What I’m saying here is to prioritize your resources accordingly.
If you’re not in a position to decide these kinds of things, you should still be thinking through how those that are decide them. You likely have a lot more influence than you think, and if you feel like you could add more value to your company or team if you got some bandwidth back by spending less time on lower priority tasks and more time on something else, speak up! Suggest some ideas for where you could offload or do away with some tasks by using a managed service, cloud, HCI, or some other technology force multiplier. After all, if your time is the thing being budgeted you probably have a better idea of how it can be utilized more effectively than anyone else.
At the end of the day, the difference between IT shops that make a transformative impact on their companies and ones that simply keep the fires burning is knowing where to apply time, effort, and money to make the company or organization more effective. If you’re always focused on providing the most value to the highest priority on the CEO’s desk, you’ll always be in good shape.
Questions for reflection:
Do you run a budget at home or in the office? Do you think of it as a prioritized plan?
Are you currently using any time saving technologies like cloud or HCI? Do you feel they justify the extra cost?
What’s something that you’re doing that you would consider to be a low priority task? Can you automate it and do something else? If no, are you sure? Why or why not?
