[kaliszad]

Seems like a few negotiation skills would be of better use than doing extreme amounts of work so somebody can take months on approving new hardware. Well guess what, the people that did slow down hardware procurement are now slowing down deployment of cloud resources as well because the fundamental problem wasn't addressed and that's organizational misalignment and disfunction.

[bluedino]

Even if you can get instant approval, Dell or HP won't Fedex you 50 servers next day like they will 50 laptops.

And once you're a customer you get to deal with sales channels full of quotes and useless meetings and specialists. You can't just order from the website.

[kaliszad]

You can get servers elsewhere as well and they can be more agile than Dell/ HPE/ SuperMicro/ Lenovo. Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte and some other brands can ship servers rather quickly. Perhaps not the next day but the prices are much lower out of the door especially if you are a smaller customer. Most companies know well in advance how much compute/ storage they will need. So if something takes a month or two it isn't a big issue.

[colechristensen]

You're going to negotiate with the structure of an entire corporation?

Excuse me CEO your budgeting process is inconvenient to my work, please change it all to be more responsive.

This is not how things work and not how changes are made. Unless you get into the C-suite or at least become a direct report of someone who is nobody cares and you're told to just deal with it. You can't negotiate because you're four levels of management away from being invited to the table.

An organization that can make agile capital expenditures in response to the needs of an individual contributor is either barely out of the founder's garage or a magical fairyland unicorn.

[kaliszad]

You would be surprised. I have unclogged processes inside and between companies before where people would tell me it's not possible or that success is unlikely.

And yes, if you are working with professionals most expenditures can be planned well in advance so you definitely can take months or even more than a year in the process. If there is a major issue affecting the business of the company you would be surprised what is possible. I've got things approved in weeks in an enterprise of 2000+ employees before and I was 5 levels down from the CEO then. I have improved my negotiation skills greatly since then (it helps when you co-found a consulting company).