Help Desk and Project Management System – Calculating the ROI

As a manager, you are always looking for ways to cut costs and increase profits for your workforce. To achieve this, some key areas IT can optimize are human resources, customer satisfaction and software application costs.

Typically IT departments use separate applications to provide insight into these areas — project management, help desk support, operations management and time tracking. Work management software is a solution that brings all of these pieces together, allowing you to streamline processes and access business information in one place. (Read more about how to calculate ROI of Work Management Software from Mark Donais)

By using a single platform to organize your employees and their work, you can see a return on your investment in the following areas:

• Increased employee efficiency and productivity
• Enhanced managerial oversight
• Improved reporting to end users and executives
• Reduced software costs

There is a process that you can use to understand your operating improvements and your project costs to determine an overall annual and cumulative Return on Investment called ROI Analysis. I’ve included a link to our TeamHeadquarters ROI Analysis spreadsheet here for you to use.

Start with a review of the operating profit improvements that the software will have on your team

Team	Impact	Increased Rev	Decreased Cost	Annual Impact	5 year Impact	Cost of not solving
Networking	Have all of my tasks and projects laid out in front of me, only have to capture my time once and spend less time with project managers answering resource and task related questions – now have a ticket system that is directly connected with projects and customers.
Database	Have all of my tasks and projects laid out in front of me, only have to capture my time once and spend less time with project managers answering resource and task related questions – now have a ticket system that is directly connected with projects and customers.
Programmers	Have all of my tasks and projects laid out in front of me, only have to capture my time once and spend less time with project managers answering resource and task related questions
Project Managers	Less time spent meeting with teams and members to gather information – information is captured at resource level and rolled up for reporting purposes
Managers	Have good information for the evaluation of employee optimization/utilization and will be able to make resource decisions
CIO	Have good information about the utilization of our team, our resource and our projects. Will be able to report with confidence to C-level
Net Operating Improvement

 

Start to consider the project costs and ongoing costs associated with the solution

Cost Item	Initial cost	Yearly cost	5 year Impact	Cost of not solving
Capital Costs
Facilities Costs
Outside services cost
Labor and payroll costs
Maintenance and License costs
Operating costs
Total Project Costs

 

It is very important to factor in the cost of not solving. Here’s an example. If for example the benefit, to the project manager is that they will spend 30% less time meeting with staff to discuss projects, get updates, etc… and that this trickle down impact will have a direct impact on the amount of time resources are spending in meetings – say 10%, then we need to factor in two things:

• What is the benefit to the company of spending less time in meetings
• What will your company experience as a result