Page 289 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

Predictable yet Flexible Costs
If you talk to a chief financial officer, accountant, or project manager and ask them the type of project they prefer, they will tell you the one that comes in on budget. Unfortunately, in the technology industry, a predictable budget can be a difficult goal to achieve. Technology, by its very nature, has a lot of uncertainty and gray areas. An analogy people like to use for custom software or a difficult implementa- tion has to do with painting. Great technologists are often more artist than engineer. As a result, you might get an absolutely phenomenal product, or you might get a complete disaster that is five or ten times over budget and completely unusable.
The result of uncertainty is difficulty in planning and conflict. A CFO or project manager would rather have an accurate figure than a low figure that could triple. When you move to the cloud, you are taking all the uncertainty out of the cost of the infrastructure and implementation. With Office 365, Microsoft has already under- taken all the risky implementation projects that come along with enterprise software. That is not to say that Microsoft teams did not come in over budget or that Microsoft did not spend three or four times what they thought it would take to get Office 365 up and running. But that doesn’t matter to you. You know exactly how much Office 365 will cost you, and you won’t have to worry about overruns. Microsoft won’t tell you that it is actually going to cost four times more per month because the software is complicated. In fact, Microsoft has a service guarantee so that if the software is not up and running per the agreement, then they are on the hook for it.
To raise the value proposition even further, you can add and remove licensing as you need it. When you have a hiring spree, you may need more licensing; in slower times, you may need to reduce your licensing. Office 365 provides this ability to scale up or down your licensing, and costs, depending on your organization’s situation.
Reduced Complexity
You would think that after being a software consultant for years and years and years, that Rosemarie would know absolutely every possible thing you could or couldn’t do with services-based software like Office 365. The secret that Rosemarie will tell you that no other consultant will tell you is that consultants and experts still learn something new every single day.
Just to clarify, Office 365 isn’t the only game in town. Rosemarie consults organi- zations every day in other suites of tools such as Google Apps, Slack, Dropbox, and others. Those tools are not the focus of this book, but it is good to keep your options in mind when making a decision. Rosemarie focuses on the best tool for her clients and sometimes that is Office 365 and sometimes it isn’t.
CHAPTER 22 Ten Office 365 Value Propositions 273