COVID-19: IT services optimisation - in-progress projects

Due to the need of increasing liquidity and optimising costs during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, some organisations are looking at halting their in-progress IT projects for short-term.

It is crucial for organisations to evaluate projects that need to be halted or continued. Due consideration also needs to be given to the process, so that the projects identified as ‘to be halted’ can continue when required.

Here is how business leaders can HALT and consider the following steps to optimise IT spend on in-progress projects

Review your IT budget downsizing requirements

• Enforcing top down cost cut targets, may result in halting some of the critical IT programmes, which may be essential to your organisation to capture market in the post-COVID era.

Analyse your IT operational costs

• Capture your IT operational costs in categories for further analysis. The cost break-up, in comparison to IT spend cut numbers, helps you understand how many IT projects need to be evaluated for halt-resume.

Evaluate current IT projects and their strategic value add to your company in post-COVID era

• Understand which projects to halt, begin with a detailed review of a set of selected Inflight IT projects which are likely candidates to be halted to meet your IT spend cuts.

Halt-Resume cost analysis of IT programmes

• Undertake a detailed analysis of each of the selected IT projects, to come up with expected Halt-Resume cost to your organisation.

How Grant Thornton’s DigiTech practice can assist

Support and assist in halting identified project

• Undertake a detailed analysis of each of the selected IT projects, to come up with expected Halt-Resume cost to your organisation.
• Provide cost analysis of resuming halted projects, in conjunction with criticality of each of the projects to key decision makers.

Create strategic roadmap to resume projects

Assist in resuming a project that may take additional effort.