Concrete Tips to Convince Senior Management

Making the Right Investment Decision

I had an idea that needed some capital investment, where we needed to buy some new servers. The goal of my idea was that the existing servers would replace the load into the new servers so that the processes become more efficient in the long term. However, it was pretty tricky to convince the higher management to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars in investment for the company's benefits 5 years after its establishment.

Convincing is an Art

In an attempt to convince the higher management, what I did was I took 2 - 3 servers and showed them the performance improvement. Once they were somewhat satisfied with it, we decided to extrapolate the servers into hundreds. It demonstrated that if 3 servers could bring so much progress, 100 servers would undoubtedly be more efficient.

Plus, what did the trick there was instead of throwing numbers, I put graphs and charts. The visual representation of it did all the talking. The upward growth chart helped them understand that as we grow further, the servers would scale better than what we have right now.

We had to ensure that everyone was on the same page from a cross-functional perspective. As we were moving to a whole different set of servers, starting from the network engineers, storage folks, and all the other IT guys, we wanted to make sure that every individual was aware of the changes and the interruptions that were to occur.

Furthermore, since it was a team effort, we all had to lean on each other’s expertise to make it happen. We collected the prior experiences and struggles that enabled us to move towards success.

Speak in a Language That Everyone Understands

• To begin with, I made the mistake of throwing a lot of technical jargon with the leadership that they could not understand. Learning it the hard way, the lesson here is that when communicating with non-techies, make sure to use graphs and charts. Simplify the concepts so that they can understand and perhaps add more into it; rather than being clueless.