We’re probably all fairly familiar with the principle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In short, to climb to the top of the pyramid and reach your full potential, there are various needs that must be met along the way, starting with the fundamentals of survival; food (fuel) and shelter.

It’s much the same with large scale IT procurement and implementation projects. Take ERP systems -to be assured of a successful project, there are many needs to be met and they don’t come cheap.

The level of financial investment a company will make when choosing an ERP system is unlikely to be less than £50k. Costs for software licensing, add-ons, customisation and ongoing support all mount up.

Factor in the hundreds or even thousands of hours dedicated to finding vendors, dealing with tenders and RFPs, project management, staff training and the myriad other admin tasks a project like this can throw up and the investment is much, much higher than the actual pounds and pence figure.

 

 

Be mindful that without sufficient investment at each stage, the project risks being unsuccessful and you and your project will never reach the top of the pyramid.

But in our experience, these projects often overlook the fundamental requirement to run any software system, the infrastructure. Or in Maslow’s terms: food and shelter.

For your software to function properly it has to be ‘sheltered’ somewhere. Be that in the cloud, on-site or in a hybrid cloud environment. And that environment needs to be sufficiently powerful to cater for your needs, i.e. it has to be well fuelled.

So if you’ve got a major IT project on the horizon, remember Abraham Maslow; get your food and shelter sorted and then aim for the very top of the pyramid!

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