Business Management ABCs

Maintenance Versus Projects (1)

Much of our live is ruled by this dilemma. The choice between maintenance and (new) projects.

The nature of maintenance is that it is an involuntary activity; it is not something you do for fun in most cases, it is something you can do long without and replace the freed time for other activities. Normally the choice is between maintenance and new projects. Projects win the attention of organizations as they are sexy, focused on dreams (about the future) and open; you often do not know where they end. The amount of risk involved is therefore much more in projects than in maintenance.

Sometimes maintenance leads to projects or involve projects. Especially when (investment in) maintenance has been lagging for a while. Objects erode, break or become weak and the chance of a collapse increases over the time when maintenance is past its due-date.

Both maintenance as projects do not only refer to objects but also to people and relations:

• we must maintain contact with friends and clients or prospects otherwise their value for the business diminishes. We keep in touch…
• New projects can be translated to acquiring new business by contacting prospects. Here too, acquisition is often preferred over maintenance with clients. The retention manager that is hot these days shows this. It can be seen as a sign of a lack of maintenance.

New information systems require a maintenance fee from ten to twenty percent of the initial investment. This means when a project has been developed by ten persons over a period of a year, at least one or two of them are needed to maintain the new system.

Now the most interesting is the following. New projects often appear to have synergy effects with existing assets. The example of Citigroup is historic for this. It appears that acquisition after acquisition led to a myriad of new solutions that remained as individuals projects (systems) in the organization. Over the last 15 years or so, it has not been possible to integrate these systems. This can be translated to: the maintenance of all those acquisitions was impossible. We all know and see what it happening now.

It the worst part is I think that we will not learn from this experience. We continue with new projects, even when (due) maintenance adds up until the whole things gets stuck, like a car that can’t move any longer…

2009 Hans Bool