Considering Return on Investment

If you decide to create a new lab for Windows 2000 deployment testing, you might need to justify the investment to your project sponsors. To help you do this, take a broad view of all the associated costs. The testing performed in the lab leads to cleaner implementations and reduced support costs. By using the lab to develop operational efficiencies, such as automated administrative tools and remote procedures, you can reduce your organization's total cost of ownership. When viewed over time, therefore, the costs of building and maintaining the lab are likely to be dramatically lower than the costs of fixing problems in production, redeploying poorly thought out or poorly tested solutions, or managing the production environment with resource-intensive processes.

Economy of scale is often possible in organizations that build separate labs for different projects. By consolidating labs and formalizing the use and maintenance of the new lab, you can let several projects share in the reduced cost of a single lab. If you decide to share a lab, however, try to choose projects that have compatible scheduling and equipment requirements It is simpler and less expensive to add a few new components to upgrade the lab for a new project than to start from scratch each time.

The more multipurpose you make the lab, the easier it is to justify the capital cost of the space, equipment, and support needed to build and run it. The lab can serve purposes ranging from early hands-on training to post-implementation problem resolution. You might consider the lab as your initial investment in training. You can even use it for educational purposes such as demonstrating functionality or deployment processes to management or other groups.

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