The work we do at Options touches on something very close to my heart – IT project overruns.
Every manager about to embark on a “Boil the Ocean” IT project should read this
Aside from it being an area most CIOs, COOs and even CEOs spend a great deal of their time attempting to navigate; it’s always been of particular interest to me for a number of personal reasons:
(i) Firstly, I’ve always had a love of execution, which often means delivering difficult projects on time and under budget.
(ii) Secondly, at Wombat our software was often only a relatively small part of much bigger and more complex solutions (at one point we estimated that ticker plant software was only 10% of the total cost of an enterprise system, albeit a very critical component). Crucially, however, we generally didn’t get paid until the whole project was completed, which meant, in short, we carried massive commercial exposure to overruns in other parts of the project, and spent many years of our lives helping customers deliver on their overall solutions.
About Options (www.options-it.com):
Options is the leading provider of cloud-enabled managed services to the global capital markets. Founded in 1993, the company began life as a hedge fund technology services provider. More than a decade ago, the company made a strategic decision to become the first provider to offer cloud services to the financial sector. Today over 250 firms globally leverage the Options platform, including the leading global investment banks, hedge funds, funds of funds, proprietary trading firms, market makers, broker/dealers, private equity houses and exchanges.