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If a model such as the kind you typically prepare in your spreadsheets is well designed, the analysis and interpretation should be straight forward; right? At least in theory, that's how it's supposed to happen. In practice, we know it doesn't quite work out that way. Why is this so?
Well for one thing, the spreadsheet model needs to encapsulate a possibly complex set of relationships in an easy to understand manner. This is a difficult challenge which can be done with traditional style spreadsheets but often are met with a disproportionate level of effort.
Think of all this as the backdrop of how Xcelsius evolved into a product.
What does Xcelsius do?Let's say you run an IT operation that services the various lines of business in your organization. Each of these business units contribute to your operating budget. Your annual budget might be something like four or six million dollars. When you get to this size of operation, you will likely set up a Service Level Agreement with the business units in your organization. Any outage in the operation beyond a set threshold is going to come from your discretionary funds; not the business units. Not only do you have to foot the bill for the outage, you will undoubtedly require additional resources to restore operations. Depending on the severity of the outage you will no doubt be monitoring the recovered operation for some period of time.
A spreadsheet can quantify all of this, but it's not going to make it easy to encapsulate the subtle relationships and allow you to vary your assumptions by turning the appropriate knobs on a control panel.
The table below shows you how a typical kind of spreadsheet might be prepared without the benefit of Xcelsius.
| XCELSIUS BEST PRACTICES | |||
| Business Continuity Planning | |||
| traditional spreadsheet | |||
| Budget Impact Analysis | Annual | Daily | |
| XYZ Systems Group Operating Budget | $6,000,000.00 | $16,438.00 | $/day |
| Outage duration | 1 | day | |
| Service Level Agreement | BCP Guarantee | 0.75 | days |
| LOB reimbursement (loss of BAU services beyond threshold of 0.75 days) | $ 4,110.00 | ||
| Additional incremental effort | 50.0% | ||
| Recovery Effort Factor | 1.5 | $24,657.00 | |
| monitoring duration | 14 | days | |
| monitoring factor | 12.5% | ||
| monitoring costs | $ 28,766.50 | ||
| Effective Budget Impact | $57,533.50 | ||
By comparison, click on the following link or image to see the Xcelsius application in action. Try adjusting the sliders and control knobs to assess the dollar impact to the operating budget. In this case, a picture is truly worth a thousand formulas!
Very quickly you will gain an appreciation for what can be done with Xcelsius.