IT teams are good at a lot of things the rest of us can’t even begin to understand. Server management, network architecture and design, troubleshooting problems – even whether to turn our machines off and on again. But it can be harder for IT to demonstrate the value of their projects, particularly when it comes in the form of less tangible benefits like improved security or a better user experience.
Proving value is just as important as adding value, especially when budget season rolls around.
Question: So how do you prove an IT project was successful?
Proving the success of your IT project requires you to start by measuring what changed before and after the project, then using that data to demonstrate the outcome.
Your specific metrics will vary but a few common ones include:
- Adoption: Are people actually using the new technology or service? This is also good opportunity to get some qualitative feedback.
- Efficiency: Has the project reduced manual work or saved time?
- Cost: Has it reduced operational or capital expenditure? This is a big one for upper management. Bold or highlight or add sparkle graphics if necessary.
- Support: Has it reduced support requests or troubleshooting? Again, link this back to efficiency and cost savings.
- Risk and security: Has it reduced exposure or improved control? Where possible, also highlight the potential business cost of the risk if it was not addressed.
- Sustainability: Has it reduced resource consumption or environmental impact?
Let’s look at a print management project, to see how we might put them into practice.
1. Adoption: Are people using it?
A project can’t deliver any of its intended benefits if people fail to use it.
That’s why adoption is one of the first metrics IT leaders should evaluate. If everything else works beautifully but adoption is low, you haven’t really solved the problem.
So instead of simply reporting that a new system has been deployed to 1,000 users, look at what those 1,000 users actually do with it.
For a print management project, this could include:
- How many users have adopted secure print release?
- How frequently are users printing from mobile devices?
- How many people are using Find-Me Printing?
- Which features or workflows have the highest adoption?
These measures tell a way more useful story than deployment numbers alone. If adoption is low, the data can also help identify where additional communication, training or configuration changes may be needed.
Pro tip: if adoption is high, this is a good place to include some glowing survey results from user surveys.
2. Efficiency: Is the organization working better?
IT projects are like grease: they aim to remove friction. The challenge is demonstrating that the friction existed in the first place, and that it’s actually been removed.
To do this, look for measurable changes in the time and effort required to complete common tasks.
In the world of print management, that might mean:
- Reduced manual printer setup and admin (don’t forget to calculate hours of staff time saved)
- More efficient use of the printer fleet (no more underutilized machines)
- Fewer steps in common print workflows (again, backed up by user reviews)
- Reduced time spent managing print infrastructure (tickets are always a solid metric here)
For example, migrating print services to the cloud may reduce the amount of infrastructure IT needs to maintain. The value of this isn’t simply that the organization now has a cloud-based print environment. The value comes from what that change enables: less infrastructure to maintain, fewer administrative tasks, and less time spent supporting the environment. (If you need more tips, we’ve got your back.)
3. Cost: Has the project saved money?
Cost is often the easiest outcome for stakeholders to understand, and your reporting should circle back to cost at every opportunity. But at the same time, cost shouldn’t be reduced to a simple before-and-after budget comparison.
Instead, look at the operational costs the project was designed to influence.
For a print management project, this could include:
- Reduced paper and toner consumption
- Fewer unnecessary print jobs
- Lower fleet maintenance costs
- Opportunities to consolidate underused printers
- Reduced infrastructure and server costs
- More informed printer procurement and replacement decisions
Reporting can connect these individual dots to a bigger financial picture, and management loves bigger financial pictures.
So instead of saying that a print management platform has reduced waste, for example, you could show how print volumes, color usage, and device utilization have changed over time. Then, connect those changes to reduced paper and toner consumption, lower maintenance costs, or fewer devices to support.
4. Support: Has the workload gone down?
Another useful measure of IT project success is what happens to the support team afterwards. This is the piece that few people, except IT managers and overworked sysadmins, pay attention to.
For example, if a project is intended to simplify a user experience, there should ideally be fewer problems for users and fewer repetitive tasks for IT. If that’s not the case, then chances are you haven’t simplified anything, or you’ve simply swapped one confusing process for a newer, shinier, just as confusing process.
For print management, relevant measures might include:
- The number of print-related support requests
- The change in causes of print issues
- Time spent troubleshooting recurring problems
- Printer-related incidents by location or device
- Changes in support demand following implementation
This kind of reporting is essential after a major change or business transformation, such as moving from traditional print servers to a cloud-based environment. Comparing support demand before and after migration can provide evidence of whether the new approach has actually reduced admin overhead.
Try and pick up some good qualitative data too. (No-one knows user pain points like users themselves.)
5. Risk and security: Is exposure being reduced?
Security improvements can be difficult to quantify because the desired outcome is often something that doesn’t happen.
Rather than simply reporting that a security feature has been deployed, you need to measure the behaviors it changes, and why those changes are significant for security.
In a print environment, useful indicators could include:
- Adoption of secure print release (no more idle documents sitting in paper trays)
- The number of documents released through secure workflows
- Unclaimed or abandoned print jobs (physical documents are an often-overlooked security exposure)
- Visibility into who is printing, where and when
- Changes in printing behavior after security controls are introduced
This is the difference between getting up in a meeting and announcing “We deployed secure printing” and demonstrating that the security control is actually being used.
6. Sustainability: Are resource savings measurable?
Sustainability is another area where IT projects can benefit from better reporting and measurement. It’s (ironically) a tree-in-the-forest scenario: if you have ESG policies in place, but no one is measuring them, are they actually working? There’s no real way to tell.
For print management, the metrics are (usually) quite straightforward:
- Total pages printed (or pages printed before and after certain IT initiatives)
- Paper consumption
- Duplex versus single-sided printing
- Color versus black-and-white printing
- Changes in print volume over time
- Reduction in unnecessary or abandoned jobs
The important point is that sustainability claims should be backed by measurable changes and real data. Not just your best hunch or staff anecdotes. In fact, this is one area where qualitative data isn’t very useful, as people often overestimate their own actions when it comes to sustainability..
Reporting can help IT teams demonstrate the impact of initiatives, rather than simply describing their goals, no matter how well-intentioned.
Our advice? Make reporting part of the project from the start
The easiest way to demonstrate the impact of an IT project is to decide how success will be measured before the project begins.
Establish your baseline, define a small number of meaningful metrics and continue then track them after implementation, weekly, monthly, and quarterly thereafter.
This turns a list of technical deliverables into something more useful for your stakeholders: evidence of what the investment delivered in terms of cost savings, recovered time, reduced risk, or improved user experience.
The golden rule: The best IT projects don’t deliver technology. They deliver measurable business outcomes.
Print management is just one example, but the principle applies to almost every IT investment. Don’t just report what you implemented. Report what changed because you implemented it.
