Justifying Preventative Maintenance

Some of the approaches that have been discussed in this chapter are expensive. Because of this, you might experience problems obtaining funding from upper management for these items. You can do several things to help yourself out in these situations.

Be sure to document all the downtime you experience for each system in the network, and try to associate a cost with it. Although you might not be able to get data that allows you to show the impact on your customers, you usually can determine the number of users who are impacted. Assuming that these users can perform only a certain percentage of their daily work without access to the computer or network, try to assign the number of hours lost due to the downtime and multiply it by an average hourly rate for the employees affected by the downtime. Most likely, you won't have access to accurate pay rates for other employees . However, a way to get around this is to multiply the hours times the minimum hourly wage and show this to upper management if it results in a significant amount. Point out that you've based your costing on the minimum wage. Because those in upper management are more likely to know the average salaries of experienced computer users, this figure still gives them a good idea of what downtime costs. In other words, if you come up with a large figure during your calculations based on the minimum wage, they'll quickly determine that the actual figure is magnitudes larger than that, and you just might get support for your preventative maintenance efforts.