MS Project

Dear Lee Ann

I would just like to follow-up with you regarding our initial discussion of possible cost-cutting measures.  I was surprised to learn that all of the employees in the Investments Department have Microsoft Project pre-loaded on their laptops. 

While the program is a “nice to have,” at a cost of $442,493 (750 Investments employees * $589.99), this is not a program that is a “need to have” for all associates.   For those employees that are managing projects, the project manager should have Microsoft Project in order to manage the overall timeline of the project with dates for specific deliverables and necessary milestones for the project.   However, this should be limited to the project manager as this person will be responsible for keeping track of the project and making sure that tasks are being achieved within the specified time period.  Not all employees will need to monitor this level of detail of a project.  Also, not all employees are involved in projects of this nature.

It appears that all of our laptops are leased with the Microsoft Project software pre-loaded.   We lease our laptops for a three year period so the annual cost of the Project software for Investments is roughly $147,498 ($442,493/3 years).  We should work with our laptop lessor to see if we could reduce the cost of the laptops if we were to lease them without the software.   This does not necessarily help with money that has already been spent, but going forward this could save us money over time. 

As an alternative we could add Microsoft Project to our Marimba desktop management site.  Project managers could then log in to Marimba and request the software.  This approach will allow only those employees with a legitimate business reason to download the software. 

There are web-based alternatives to Project such as QuickBase for example but this is not necessarily any cheaper.  The most basic version of QuickBase costs $299/month for up to 10 users.  Assuming only 100 employees would require the application, that comes out to $35,880 annually ($299 * 12 months * 10) compared to an annual cost of $19,666 for MS Project ($589.99*100 = $58,999/3 years).   Also if we moved away from having Project pre-loaded on all laptops, the cost could be spread out over a 4 or 5 year period as opposed to just the three years that we lease our laptops for.

Overall, for project management software, I feel that Microsoft Project would be the best alternative however we currently have too many employees that have the software but are not using.  I was not even aware I had it, if we can find a way to limit the number of licenses, this could be a good route to cut some costs without it even affecting employees.