Cloud Hosting

Businesses need to assess the impacts unforeseen disasters like the coronavirus can have beyond major event cancellations and manufacturing slowdowns.

Such a large proportion of business operations are underpinned by technology, from the cloud servers hosting business critical data right down to the devices employees work on.

When the IT teams that run these systems are themselves affected by disasters, it becomes a nightmare for IT departments to not only maintain usual operations as much as possible, but also to accurately quantify the impact its had and put in place steps to manage these incidents in future.

For many businesses, incidents like coronavirus have an impact on the value that IT employees and contractors actually deliver against their costs. Businesses that can track this (like those with agile processes) stand a much better chance of adapting in the face of such disasters.

If organisations arent able to accurately assign labour costs to projects or products and their forecasted value, theyll start to see vast discrepancies in projected outcomes against delivered outcomes. And this is likely to be more pronounced if theyre using a waterfall-style project-based system.

As companies begin to reevaluate their workflow with new precautions in mind, its a good time to rethink how investment funding and governance processes are set up, whether thats for project-based or agile development.

Being able to appropriately prioritise investments, optimise resources and report on value is always going to be useful, but its more important than ever when all of these things are in flux as they are now.

Its only by being able to automatically update forecasts and track costs that organisations will truly be able to assess the impact of the coronavirus, and plan accordingly.

More:
Coronavirus: How organisations align IT costs with business value - Software Testing News