Blogs

In my post last week, I talk about a specific problem many organizations have a around managing contracted vendors and resources.  I left off discussing soft costs one might see within this set of business activities which might include  the time required for approvals, time waiting for hiring decisions, or interview feedback, as well as the disorganization around managing candidate resumes. There are also less obvious soft costs such as cost of turnover, lost productivity or project delays, low morale, or missed opportunities or candidates.  I said I would walk through an example of “IT staffing/vendor management requests” in more detail and provide an example of estimating lost productivity of the business use case.   So let’s look at an example to see how much lost productivity we might find in this example of IT contracting staffing requests:

1. Let’s assume you receive about 2000 IT staffing requests a year.
2. The average processing time for fulfilling IT staffing requests is on average 6 weeks (or 240 working hours).
3. The lost calendar hours waiting for staffing requests to process would equate to 480,000 lost hours per year waiting (2000 requests * 240 hours waiting per request).
4. Those 480,000 total calendar hours divided by 24 = 16,667 days total waiting.
5. Multiply 16,667 days waiting times 8 hours in a day = 133,336 Lost Productive Work Hours Waiting for IT Staffing Requests in this example.
6. The average hourly rate of your employees (those submitting and fulfilling the requests) is estimated at about $55/hour.  
7. $55 * 133,336 lost productive hours = $7,333,480 as the Total Cost of Loss in Productivity

Once you understand the end of end process and estimate the current loss in productivity involved in the current set of business activities, you can then begin to set a target such as reducing the request fulfillment time by 50%.  Then you can begin to leverage the capabilities of SharePoint.  The assumption is you probably already have it inside your organization and all you need is your own Site Collection.  The costs are minimal and you can now provide IT managers a place to request resources via a centralized SharePoint web form and self-track the progress of their requests and candidates throughout the interview process.   You can empower the individuals who work with outside staffing agencies to manage the candidates and resumes, present them in SharePoint to the hiring manager and include the in-flow of information and documents all within SharePoint lists and libraries with appropriate metadata.   Managers can enter feedback and executives can approve billing rates.  Lastly, you can begin to report to executives and measure cycle times, average billing rates, and more --- all from the data and information captured in the solution built on SharePoint.    

Just imagine this SharePoint solution allows you to reduce the time it takes to fulfill IT Staffing requests by 20% or 50%?   In our example, that’s a cost savings of millions that are measurable and easily communicated to executives and business leaders to justify the cost of SharePoint and showcase the value and ROI of the technology platform.