Tuesday

With fishing well and truly cancelled, it was just a regular Tuesday at the mill.  However I am involved with something not entirely normal in that we have been set a large cost challenge from our customer.  The work for this involves analysing the supporting data, someone else's supporting data I might add, for a large deal that was done at the start of last year.  This large deal was to provide additional infrastructure to enable fast-track testing for a project with an immovable end date.  This meant that, at the time, the customer was happy to pay whatever it cost for us to make this happen, because the alternative was regulatory hell.

Now, a year later, in the cold light of day, all that JFDI extravagance is looking a bit expensive, and consequently our customer is investigating ways to reduce the costs without, please note dear reader, any great impact to service and capability.  This latter point may not, as yet, be fully understood by our customer, but by the time we have done the analysis and preparation to present our ideas back to them, they will.  Furthermore, it is entirely possible that alongside the "we can trim a bit here" conversations, there will also be "and over here you could do things better" and "if you spend a little here, you will get a lot".  i.e. For every down-sell, there is an up-sell.

Time will tell how successful we are.