Business thinking - PC replacements
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@mike-davis said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
All accounting issues aside, in the end I think the mass upgrade is more disruptive to business on all sides than the trickle replacement.
For those of you that have done mass upgrades, consider the process.
You select a particular model and config based on that days standards.
You have them all shipped and have a pile of PCs sitting somewhere.
They have to all be unboxed. How many fit on your bench.
You spend time (weeks?) working up your image.
You start to push your image as quick as your hardware will allow.
You start swapping out user machines as quickly as you can.
User questions start rolling in - you're still trying to move computers off your bench.
You realize you have to tweak your image.
You redo the image and reimage the machines that were already done.I did this for a shop last week. Everything done in one day, the whole thing. Even replaced the firewall, apps, basically everything. If you have a company that has weekends off, you can do this in a weekend.
NTG used to do this kind of work for Fortune 1000 companies. Bring in a team on a Friday night, do a crazy weekend and have an office on new hardware, OS, apps, configurations, monitors and more all before Monday morning.
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@scottalanmiller Yeah we still do from time to time over the weekend or at night
Then all the new tickets the following 2 days for users getting used to things 
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@dashrender I guess I'm not explaining enough of the specifics, which is something I'm guilty of oftentimes, and I apologize if that's the case. If there is more work to be done than is getting done, then there is automatically a need to increase the available labor availability to address that need. The only good ways to do that are typically to pay for more labor time (generally by hiring more people), to demand more labor out of existing laborers (still not free unless employees are salaried/exempt), or to as the saying goes "work smarter, not harder" by reducing impediments that are costing labor time. If I only replace computers every four years, but doing so will save something in the ball-park of $400/year, then I've saved the cost of the computers twice over in that span of time in user labor time that was up to that point unavailable for other tasks. It's no different than the robots vs humans argument. Robots and automation tend to cost a lot of money, but their costs to install and maintain are often significantly less than the costs of the time humans spend getting less done. Erego, most businesses have implemented or begun considering implementing automation for all sorts of things. Giving humans better tools so they have the capacity to be more productive is in the same vein, as it's removing hard limits to certain portions of their productive time.
In the aforementioned scenario, a faster computer would ultimately result in each user having just a half-day shy of an entire extra work-week a year of productive time. With 100 users for instance, that's a hell of a lot of opportunity cost that was just recovered, and a hell of a lot of productive labor can occur in that much time. Sure it will cost more in year one, but year two would result in saving thousands upon thousands of dollars, assuming that the organization makes good use of all the extra usable labor time. Again though, it's all based upon the assumption of the organization making good use of their labor. As you suggested though, if the business sucks, it's probably a waste of time.. but the problem was always much bigger than IT, and not something IT could ever address in the first place if that is so.
IT's job is just to enable the organization to do what it needs to do. Improving efficiency to free up labor time that is otherwise spent wastefully is only ever not beneficial if there is no additional work that needs to be accomplished, which I dare say is fairly rare. There is no such thing as zero-cost. Everything costs money, time, or both in some form or fashion, so there's really no reason not to reduce inefficiencies as long as the improved outcomes are greater than the cost to achieve them.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
If it costs my minion an hour per device, we're still netting about $400/year rough improvement in efficiency from IT's perspective when the swap is done properly, and still not including the electricity draw improvements.
And again you have no concept of employee cost. Did we not go down this road last time with you?
You said $416 savings and now an hour of someone's time only consumes $16?
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@jaredbusch said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
If it costs my minion an hour per device, we're still netting about $400/year rough improvement in efficiency from IT's perspective when the swap is done properly, and still not including the electricity draw improvements.
And again you have no concept of employee cost. Did we not go down this road last time with you?
You said $416 savings and now an hour of someone's time only consumes $16?
This is the calculation that he is doing: "If your users have to wait say.. one minute an hour, for 8 hours a day, every day of a work year just because the computers are getting old; even if everyone is making $12/hr, you are going to spend $416/yr per-employee to pay employees to do nothing but sit and wait at their PC accomplishing nothing (with which, you could almost buy a brand new PC anyway and save all that wasted labor money)."
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Scott's assessment is pretty much exactly what I'm suggesting, although a significant majority of users aren't likely to be getting paid anything nearly as low as $12/hr in most organizations, which skews the numbers far more in favor of replacing hardware versus not. My subordinate makes approximately equivalent to $16/hr. However I only used that number to make the math simple/easy.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
Scott's assessment is pretty much exactly what I'm suggesting, although a significant majority of users aren't likely to be getting paid anything nearly as low as $12/hr in most organizations, which skews the numbers far more in favor of replacing hardware versus not. My subordinate makes approximately equivalent to $16/hr. However I only used that number to make the math simple/easy.
Also, it is not what they are paid but what they cost. A $12/hr employee definitely costs at least $15/hr to maintain.
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The further you take things out in terms of considering what employees cost to employ versus the cost of hardware, it's extremely difficult to justify keeping hardware that causes unnecessary labor waste. It's the same exact phenomenon that explains why executives get to be driven around rather than drive themselves at a certain level for instance. It's got nothing to do with their capacity to drive or not, and everything to do with it's more profitable for the organization to hire someone extra to drive them around and such so they can work during transit times, than it is to have them spend that time focusing on driving or whatever.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
The further you take things out in terms of considering what employees cost to employ versus the cost of hardware, it's extremely difficult to justify keeping hardware that causes unnecessary labor waste. It's the same exact phenomenon that explains why executives get to be driven around rather than drive themselves at a certain level for instance. It's got nothing to do with their capacity to drive or not, and everything to do with it's more profitable for the organization to hire someone extra to drive them around and such so they can work during transit times, than it is to have them spend that time focusing on driving or whatever.
I'm pretty sure that biggest value there is parking, not the driving. Execs rarely work while moving in the car, but not having to park and find cars saves so much time that that alone often justifies it.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
The further you take things out in terms of considering what employees cost to employ versus the cost of hardware, it's extremely difficult to justify keeping hardware that causes unnecessary labor waste. It's the same exact phenomenon that explains why executives get to be driven around rather than drive themselves at a certain level for instance. It's got nothing to do with their capacity to drive or not, and everything to do with it's more profitable for the organization to hire someone extra to drive them around and such so they can work during transit times, than it is to have them spend that time focusing on driving or whatever.
Yes I completely get this point. I'm totally on board - the bigger question is - is the company prepared to take advantage of that extra time? If they don't, then it's not a wise investment. And Yes that is IT's job to help determine if the added resources (i.e. time for employees to do more work) are worth the cost (replacing hardware/implementation/etc) to the company. But, if like most SMBs it just results in slack time for the employees, then the spend is just a waste. So I'm back to saying this is NOT something that can or ever should be done in a vacuum. These types of sweeping changes (i.e. adding time for more work to be done at x cost) needs to be considered by the management team.. not solely by IT.
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If the company can utilize that time, they should seriously rethink employees.
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@scottalanmiller said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
If the company can't utilize that time, they should seriously rethink employees.
FTFY
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@scottalanmiller said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
I did this for a shop last week. Everything done in one day, the whole thing. Even replaced the firewall, apps, basically everything. If you have a company that has weekends off, you can do this in a weekend.
How many users and how many apps? Did you migrate user profiles? Was it part of the job to make sure the My Little Pony screen saver was migrated?
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@mike-davis said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
@scottalanmiller said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
I did this for a shop last week. Everything done in one day, the whole thing. Even replaced the firewall, apps, basically everything. If you have a company that has weekends off, you can do this in a weekend.
How many users and how many apps? Did you migrate user profiles? Was it part of the job to make sure the My Little Pony screen saver was migrated?
Fourteen users, not a lot of apps. Mostly MS Office, some basic stuff that you'd expect like new browsers, a few odds and ends utilities as requested by people and their medical system (which was not large.) Please installing printers, scanners, shared drives and such. All pretty basic, but you generally expect pretty basic in an office of that size.
