You are an IT Manager for a team of 11 full-time IT professionals (yourself, 2 network administrators, 3 system administrators, 2 software developers, and 3 "secure closed area" administrators). Your team has been together consistently for 6 years, and have a great working relationship. You are also friends outside of work, getting dinner together regularly as well as attending other events as a team.

Your IT team supports an infrastructure that serves 400 employees of a company that performs research and development (known as R&D) for industry and DoD customers. The infrastructure is made up of numerous servers in a server room with a hot/cold aisle. File-servers that serve production data, a VMWare ESXi cluster, a NetApp SAN, a server that hosts Atlassian products (Confluence, Jira, & BitBucket), a server with a Microsoft SQL 2012 R2 database, Cisco Catalyst 3750x switches, and APC Power Distribution make up the main components of your server room (there are others, but for the purposes of this discussion, think about those). The Jira instance also serves as a helpdesk ticketing system.

One of your system administrators and one of your software developers come to you to propose a plan to implement a major change to your infrastructure. They want to implement a new helpdesk ticketing system, JitBit. They claim your current Jira helpdesk system doesn't have the functionality that they need to serve your internal employees efficiently. A 9 month time to implement deadline is proposed, and to buy an on-premise version of JitBit would cost $2,499 annually for enterprise-class support. Currently, Jira costs $2,000 annually for enterprise class support. You would also have to buy a new HP ProLiant DL380 G9 server (costs approximately $3,000), but you could use the existing SQL Database server.

What would be the first thing you ask your teammates?

What would be the second thing you ask your teammates?

What does your gut instinct tell you about this proposed project?

If you were to vote "yes" to accept the proposal, how would you document this change to your end users (the 400 people your team supports)? OR If you were to vote "no" to decline this proposal, what do you provide as follow up/justification to your internal team?