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Are you ready to kickstart your 2023 IT department planning?
Q4 is the perfect time to build your IT strategy for the new year. But knowing where to start – and where to focus your planning efforts – can be a daunting task. Do you know your priorities? Do you have a plan for your budget and future costs? How can you truly know you’re ready?
Introducing our Ultimate 2023 IT Admin’s ToolKit. This all-in-one download has 4 free tools that will make your new year’s planning thorough, intuitive, and effective. While you are welcome to simply open the tools and get to work, we wanted to make your planning even easier. Use this guide to see the top 4 things we think Admins should do to prep for 2023 – and how to use our toolkit to achieve each one.
1. Gauge Your Current Readiness with the Assessment Tool
The first step to creating a 2023 tech plan is to take stock of where you’re currently at. Understanding where strengths and weaknesses are will help inform your plan’s focus for the new year. For this task, use our 2023 IT Readiness Assessment Tool.
The readiness assessment gives IT admins a clear picture of your IT resources, asset conditions, existing security measures, and more so you can plan accurately for the future. The tool considers four main areas of readiness (physical, software, cloud services, and security), and has you assign a number ranking to each item in each area, with “1” being completely unprepared, and “5” being entirely confident. Then, you’ll get an overall breakdown to see where your lowest scores are. Those areas are the best places to begin focusing your planning efforts.
2. Organize Your Priorities with the Priority Matrix Tool
Once you’ve identified your readiness starting point, you can begin organizing your priorities for 2023 and establishing a loose timeline for completion. Our IT Priority Matrix Tool allows you to weigh urgencies to determine which requests and tasks should take precedence in your ever-changing IT environment.
The IT Priority Matrix is designed to help you keep your workload manageable. Use it to review and assess your projects. This is not a task management system, but a living document, changing each week or month as your priorities change.
With this tool, you can break down any task over 5 major pillars:
- Potential impact on the business.
- Time to completion.
- Requestor position.
- Resource expended.
- Cost budget / cost avoidance.
You can then assign different priority weights to each pillar, with 1 being lowest priority and 3 being highest (say, for instance, that a task is only a “1” on potential business impact, but it was requested by your highest-spending client, making the requestor position a “3”). Then, the tool will automatically prioritize the tasks for you based on tackling the high business-value components first.
3. Audit Your Current and Future Costs
When considering a budget for the new year, you must first audit both your current and projected costs incurred by your equipment, your team, and your business as a whole. This measure of complete cost, called total cost of ownership (TCO) includes an item’s initial purchase price, any ongoing fees, maintenance, and even indirect costs (like long-term training and support). If it sounds like an overwhelming thing to calculate, our TCO Calculator is the perfect tool for you.
The tool allows you to compare 1-3 things (and these “things” could truly be anything, from different tech stacks to employee numbers) based on their cost today, their future costs, and when (if ever) they will balance out over time. You compare each component over 6 categories: infrastructure, hosting, software/apps, devices/hardware, personnel/support, and rollout costs.
Calculating TCO can help admins identify areas to improve workflow and decrease costs. It also provides an objective measurement of what’s a sound investment – and what’s not.
4. Update Your Budget
Once you’ve identified your 2023 priorities and determined your business’s TCO, you have all the information you need to create an updated budget for the new year. Our Budgeting Template will reveal patterns that help set your organization’s (or department’s) financial outlook for the coming year.
The tool manages interdepartmental cross-charges, helps you determine a budget based on your projected expenses, and lets you compare your year over year changes so you know exactly what you need to do, and what areas you’ll need to invest in to make your strategic technology plan successful.
Once you’ve used all these tools, you should be ready to handle anything 2023 will throw at you. But if you want to be sure, feel free to retake the IT Readiness Assessment to see how much your score has changed. The IT Admin’s 2023 Planning Kit page also has additional resources, like Forrester’s Planning Guide, a mental health roadmap, and a guide to IT centralization for additional learning and context. Check out the site, and get started on your 2023 goals today.
New Year Planning is Easier with JumpCloud
If any of your new year’s initiatives involve upgrading your tech stack and you’re not a current JumpCloud user, there’s never been a better time to get onboard. If you’d like to learn more, get in touch with us today, or skip right to the free trial.
