Our Dynamics 365 cost calculator gives you a costed range for your implementation before you’ve spoken to anyone at TrueNorth IT, or anyone else for that matter.
It came out of a question that we get asked at most initial discussions: “Roughly, what are we looking at?”. Our honest answer has always been that it depends, followed by an offer of a discovery phase. That’s still true, and discovery is still how you get a proper figure. But if you’ve been asked to put a business case together by the end of the month, you need something to work with before then.
What the calculator asks you
There are eight questions and they take about ten minutes. They’re about your organisation and what you’re replacing, and none of them are technical. You won’t need to know the details of what Dataverse is or how many custom fields your old system has. And besides, the questions you can’t answer turn out to be one of the most useful things you take away. More on that below.
There’s also an optional last step where you can add your own figures for training, the dip in productivity while people get used to the new system and the return you’re expecting. Skip it if you’d rather. The estimate works perfectly well without.
What you get at the end
Your headline range appears on screen straight away, along with a full breakdown. There’s also a time plan and a list of risks relevant to your particular project. We don’t ask for any email address or any other details at any point. You can download your full report, because it runs to a few pages and you’ll probably want to forward it to someone.
It’s far more than just licence costs. You’ll get a cost range for the implementation with the working shown, so you can see what’s pushing the number up and what would bring it down. Alongside it sits the Microsoft licence cost, plus our support costs for the first three years.
How to use it in a business case
A range on its own won’t get anything through a budget meeting. Here’s how we’d use it.
Put the range in, not the midpoint. It’s tempting to take the middle figure and call it the budget. However, a board that’s seen tech projects overrun before will trust a range with the reasons behind it far more than one confident number, Therange gives you room to manoeuvre when the detail arrives after the discovery phase.
Give the licence and support costs their own line. The implementation cost provided by the calculator is a one-off. Licences and support are every month for as long as you use the system, so the calculator makes sure that nobody is surprised by the bill in year two.
Turn your “don’t knows” into a list. Every question that you couldn’t answer is something that your business case hasn’t worked out yet. It’s often the data: where it lives, how clean it is and how much history you need to keep. Identifying those things up front makes the case stronger, because it shows you know where the risk is.
Show the working. The breakdown explains what’s driving your figure, so use that rather than just the total. “It’s at the upper end because we need to connect to the finance system and bring across ten years of records” is an argument. A number on its own is just a number.
What it can’t do
It’s an estimate, not a quote. A calculator can’t see the state of your data, the systems it’ll need to talk to or the people in your organisation who’ll object to any change at all. Those are the things that can move a project’s cost, and no online tool is going to find them for you.
What it can do is tell you which end of the scale you’re at, and why. For most people that’s enough to start a proper conversation with their board. It isn’t enough to sign anything, and we’d be wary of any tool that told you otherwise.
Where the numbers come from
We’ve been implementing Dynamics 365 projects for over a decade, mostly for organisations of between a hundred and a few thousand people, in the private and public sectors. The ranges in the calculator stem from what those projects actually cost us to deliver. They’re not a Microsoft price list with a margin added, and we’ll keep revising them as our own costs change.
When you’ve got your number
If the range looks about right and you’d like to know whether it holds up for your situation, book a scoping conversation with Gareth Davies, our Director of Delivery. It’s half an hour on Teams, with no slides. He’ll tell you where he thinks the estimate is about right and where your situation is likely to push it, and if something worries him, he’ll say so on the call rather than in a proposal three weeks later.
Not at that stage yet? Our post on what to know before you write the business case for Dynamics 365 covers what usually gets missed.
