My current commute takes me to central London every weekday, either to St James’s Park or to Westminster in London Underground’s Zone 1. Our local station is where Zone 2 meets Zone 3. During peak times (7am-10am and 4pm- 7pm) the one-way fare is £2.90. Off-peak the fare is £2.40. My preferred working hours are 10am to 6pm but at times I have stayed beyond 7pm to try and finish the day’s tasks. On those days I save 50p on my journey home. It’s a guaranteed way to save money, but it doesn’t feel that way. I would rather get things finished by 6pm and head home, even though it will cost me 50p more. It is worth a lot more than 50p to me to get home an hour earlier.

The concept of saving money is an interesting one in terms of IT projects. Many of them (and I’m dealing in a very general way here – no specifics right now) are planned and executed with the goal of reducing costs. Unfortunately in many cases this cost-reduction shows that previous projects (again, no specifics; it could be related to hardware, software, networks or cloud provision) were such poor value that any replacements will save money. And sometimes the amount of money you save doesn’t justify what you have to go through to get there, like me saving 50p on my journey home.