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Ponder Stakeholders’ Questions Before Pitching an Upgrade

When it comes to upgrading hardware or software, technical people are pretty good at explaining how they're planning to make some infrastructure changes. Often there’s less focus on outlining why they want to make the changes in the first place. In our enthusiasm to improve the infrastructure, we techies can easily overlook two key questions:

• What’s the benefit of this change?
• What’s the cost?

Whatever the technical change might be, chances are you’ll require some buy-in from key stakeholders. You (the techie) might understand perfectly why that OS upgrade or new hardware will fix your technical issues and maybe bring world peace with it.

Others, however, may need to be convinced before they give their approval. They could be managers, users, application owners or developers. If there’s an outage, or some possible cost or impact, they might be wondering whether the change is worth the cost.

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