Upper management support is vital to the success of the program, not only because the investment in reuse may be high enough to require their authorization, but because reuse entails significant change in the way project-organizations operate. Organizational change typically meets resistance, and high level leadership plays an important role in instilling a vision that inspires and motivates those affected by the change. In order to actually achieve the tantalizing rewards from reuse, projects can no longer be viewed as independent entities that can be managed without attention to a wider network of projects that extends not just across organizational subunits but into the future as well. Champions of reuse who have the power to influence all of the affected entities in the producer-consumer network are needed to encourage commitment to the program.
Upper levels of management are more likely to have a strategic, long term view than lower levels of management who generally have a more focused, tactical orientation. Long term commitment to the process is particularly important, because consideration of reuse in the short term may reveal reuse to be a drain on scarce resources that could prompt management to regard the investments as sunk costs and bail out of the program, while a longer term view could have shown the expected rewards to be high.
Because management support is so central to the success of the reuse program [#!Gri93!#], it is vital that they support reuse when the opportunity cost of not employing systematic reuse is high. Frequently, managers prefer to err on the side of conservatism when the costs, benefits, payback and risks are unclear. Therefore, the opportunity cost has to be assessed, and this analysis should encompass a multi-project, long term view that identifies the reuse costs and benefits, and estimates those that can be quantified with enough confidence to remain credible. The revenue-side benefits of reuse (including the impact of earlier time to market, higher quality, and opportunities to attack niche markets with customized products [#!MW93!#]) should not be ignored. Indeed, the strategic benefits of reuse, such as reduced time to market or enhanced consistency in the product line, have generally been more powerful rallying points for top HP managers than reduced costs [#!Wen92!#].