Question 1

If the company decides to do that, and the scope of each project cannot be reduced, in which other respect will the project change?

Ongoing costs per year and benefits per year are reduced. The timeline has to increase as people can not (officially) work more than full-time.

What will be the impact on the economic value of each project and the whole portfolio? Calculate it by making the necessary adjustments in the spreadsheet.

We have 140/188.3 (= 0.7435) FTE, which means we can only do about 75% of the work. Therefore, assuming the earnings in accordance to progess is linear, we decrase the cost per year and benefits per year by 25%, and increase time by 33%.

As an alternative, the company may use 48 additional FTE from an external service provider helping with the projects. Those FTE carry a 34% higher cost than internal staff. What is the impact on the business case?

We have 1 * 140 + 1.34 * 48.3 = 204.722 total standard FTEs to pay, instead of 188.3. Assuming the cost of 188.3 was 4.1, we now have 204/188.3 * 4.1 = 4.4418  cost per year. This is a slight increase, however it still keeps the values similar enough to not change the statistics too much.

As another alternative, you may cancel or delay one or more projects in the portfolio altogether. What would be the impact?

It would be hard to decide on a project, as it seems all of them are valued the same. Parts of the company could feel underappreciated. Delaying has the same problem, and expands the costs and delivery time by quite a bit.

Which is the economically most beneficial alternative? Why (beyond of “it gives the best numbers”)? What general learnings can you derive from your analysis?

Economically, it would be best to employee external people. The numbers do not really change much and everyone is satisfied.

Question 2

Assume projects A-D use Java as programming language, and project E uses COBOL. The Solution Delivery staff of the company has the following profiles:

20 FTE Project Management,

44 FTE Business Analysis and Testing,

18 FTE Software Engineering COBOL,

58 FTE Software Engineering Java.

What would the different potential decisions on the project portfolio mean for your availability to staff the projects? Which decisions would lead to major complications for you, and which?
What could you do to overcome them?

Cancelling a project A-D, it would not have a big negative impact on the staff availability. It would help to focus on the other projects and could potentially be enough to finish all others in time.

Cancelling project E would not be a great idea though, as there are 18 FTE focused on COBOL, which don't have an alternate project

As the head of IT, how would you aim to manage your workforce to avoid such complications

I would try to not stop work on project E, and continue so many of the projects from A-D so we can optimally use the workers we have. Also, have side-employees as a back-up

Question 3

Which advantages does Microsoft have vs. these other providers? Think about it from a user’s perspective (which would use Microsoft’s products, which others).

Microsoft is a big brand and can provide a better user experience. Especially since it is a big brand, it has a lot of capital to engineer, troubleshoot and help users. If you want the best product, Microsoft likely offers it Microsoft products seem quite expensive for what you get. There are definitely cheaper alternatives that may require a bit more work, but save a lot of money over the long run.

How is the strong push of Microsoft into that market affecting the other providers? Consider especially the recent move of Microsoft to make many functions of Power Automate available for free for Windows 10.

Microsoft takes shares of the market away, which others can't use anymore. Especially when adding a clearly better or cheaper (even free) version, low-end users will accept a slight increase in difficulty if it saves them money. For really big brands, they will acquire the best solution, so there is a very small group in the middle, that will head to the large part of competitors.

This disrupts the market and decreases the possibility of competing.

From a competition authorities point of
view, how do you assess the moves by Microsoft?

It would be very important to follow them exactly. Microsoft is a very powerful company that can easily become a market leader, so it would be advisable to find something to differentiate from their product, or have a clear advantage that can not easily be replicated.