The University of Utah, Utah’s flagship higher education institution and its primary care hospital, decided in 2016 to overhaul their networked computing infrastructure and its associated costing and pricing implications. In mid-2017, the project was rolled out.
Myself and at the time my senior product manager worked side-by-side on the costing and pricing of this massive effort. The infrastructure overhaul affected everyone on campus and at the hospital: over 30,000 stakeholders (students, faculty, and staff). This environment had been around for over a decade at this point and had undergone very few upgrades. It was past due for this project.
While the engineers focused on the planning and execution of the project, we were intensely focused on the economics, competitiveness, and end-user experience. We spent weeks analyzing various invoices for millions of dollars-worth of hardware and software licensing. We spent another several weeks determining which costs we could recover and those which were effectively sunk. Working alongside finance, we built a 5-year cost-recovery model that was used as the platform from which pricing for space in this new environment was determined.
Beyond the finance activities, we built customer advisory boards (CABs) of willing stakeholders who served to inform our decision-making. Specifically, as part of this new environment, we needed to build a new UI/UX to support ordering of services. Our CABs served as beta testers of this new experience. Their participation was fundamental to our success in this design.
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