One of my clients has a IT department with insane security restrictions. This means that some of us freelancers can’t use our webb-based e-mail, a lot of sites is blocked and so on. At one time the IT department opended thair warm and friendly arms to us and told us to list all the non-acessible URLs that we needed access to and after that they would run a security-rating to see if they could open the ports for us.

So a PM set up a Excel-file, put it on the “project-server” where all the PMs store their stuff and launched the “project” by sending us an e-mail with the request to fill the Excel file with our non-accessible urls.

The result is, since the creative-staff can’t access the PM server, that 7-8 people has to get someone with access to the server to send them the Excel-file, open it, put the URLs in there, save it and send it back to the person with access to the server. After that the PM has to compile the 7-8 different Excel-files back into one and send that one to the IT-department.

Ruffly that would be 7-8 people spending about 30 minutes getting the Excel-file, 10 minutes inserting the URL and sending it back, the access-persons will spend 10 minutes each putting the file on the server. After that the PM will spend lets say 30 minutes compiling the file.
Result: 6 hours locked up into the “project” not to mention all the disturbances for everyone involved.

The alternate solution would be the webb-based project-managed solution; IT sets up a task (10 min), PM sends it to everyone it concerns (10 min). Everyone submits their URLs (8×10 min) then the PM sends a “Go” to the IT-department that log in and gathers the URLs (another 10-30 min).
Result: maximum 2 hours of work and minimal disturbances.

… so not beeing online is costing a lot of money.