9.8 Service Delivery and Cost Recovery

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I have alluded to the potential of beneficiaries to be cranky if not disruptive, and I devote Chapter 13 to that interesting battleground. A word about them here is useful in terms of the budget. In most major corporations and governmental agencies, users (i.e., beneficiaries) pay for services received through various user-based taxes. In my experience, this generally includes desktop and laptop PCs, use of LAN and mainframe file and print services, e-mail, dial tone, voice mail, and so forth. Many, if not all, of your project deliverables cost the corporation an initial outlay for new equipment and licenses, services, salaries, and consulting fees. That is your budget. In the normal course of business, however, the end user receiving these new products or services as a result of your project will be charged, normally on a recurring charge basis per server, per site, or per user. So, as project manager, I may give the vendor $X million for laptops, but the beneficiary I install them for will pay the corporation back at a rate of a few hundred dollars per month, per laptop, over a 3-year period. ^[4]

What this boils down to is that beneficiaries see themselves as customers, and why not? With that title comes its privileges, which include fussing with you over such technology choices as vendor used, specifications, and whether or not they want to pay for the "cool stuff" too. Presumably, your technology team made such decisions based on merit or need, but that does not guarantee that the beneficiary community agrees on how you and your team propose to spend their money. In fact, in such a scenario, we had to ask the beneficiaries to provide additional money for certain features for which we were not funded but they demanded. Once that was hammered out, we had to enlist the beneficiaries' assistance with the "standards police," who took exception to the uplifted specs pushed on the project team by the user community.

^[4]Or whatever the current depreciation schedule is.

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