Earlier, we used to treat these tool requests as stand-alone requests and decide on it based on the usefulness of the tool, cost, priority/need to buy the product and other factors. As a service provider, when we bid on a development project and if our potential customer is insisting that we have a particular tool to award us the contract – we are likely to invest on it.

So how do you justify the cost on this tool? For sure, you can use ROI to justify the investment. Normally though, most developers don’t like to be asked that question – simply because it is difficult to put a number on the ROI. It may cost $2500 to buy the tool (or) take 1-2 months to search, find and fine-tune an open source tool. But, it is difficult for the developers or end users to associate a number for ROI. (While all along, you know that savings on a highly paid engineer’s time can directly result in cost savings).

Today, when we get a tool request, we ask a few fundamental questions right at the start:

• How is the tool going to change your work life?
• How will your productivity be affected – will your work output increase or be faster?
• How will the quality of the output improve?

These questions help the teams quite a bit. They think twice before coming up with a tool request now – they know that unless their answers are crystal clear, it is difficult for them to justify the request. The good thing about these questions are that they are not deterrents, but actually help in fostering the innovation thought – how do I do things better than what I am doing currently? If buying or developing a tool will improve the way things are currently done, go all out and get it. Cost is not a major obstacle.

In most of the tools scenarios, the first group which has requested for the tool / used the tool would have benefited the most. And, proliferation of this tool across the organization becomes slower as time passes by. So, we ask our teams to consciously look at how we can promote the best tools that we have, effectively and efficiently (obviously, they have to justify the license costs while doing this).