Most of you have probably seen the post on the SharePoint team blog post regarding a sample project plan for a MOSS deployment, but I thought I would point out how valuable this is from a cost planning perspective. I suppose depending on the resources your IT organization has, the IT Architect or consultant may have to create a plan for all the initial costs or technical estimates for a MOSS upgrade or deployment. This document really itemizes all the non-technical aspects of the project as well as the technical efforts. As an architect, I know I tend to focus a plan on all of the technical aspects that are needed for a deployment such as how many servers are we going to need, how much SAN space, how much custom code, etc. I will also include time for your business analysts, project managers, etc, as well as some time for configuration and deployment. But if MOSS is new to you, then those last two usually don't get all the thought that they deserve. I think that happens because the common approach is to deploy MOSS as just a portal, and not consider the value it brings as an overall enterprise platform. For example, how much time will it take to create a document management strategy - creating workflows, and defining content types to truly organize documents in a metadata fashion. How much time will it take to create a Records Retention strategy and Archiving Strategy based on all the different business rules in an organization (which will set the scope for the different libraries and record routes that need to be configured). Will you be creating an enterprise search strategy utilizing MOSS to handle all searching functionality for the organization including searching of file shares or Line of Business applications outside of SharePoint? How many one-off web forms can you kill, and plug into InfoPath forms delivered on the portal? How will you integrate will all the other applications, portals, databases, etc in your organization? How much time will it take to get a consensus from the different divisions in a organization on all those strategies? When an organization is new to MOSS most of these questions could likely be asked by the business towards the tail end of the requirements stage as they start to see the potential of the platform - as opposed to up-front when you are selling your business case to management. These types of efforts, if left unplanned, will usually involve you going back to management to ask for more money and time.
While this document wont really give you a "hand holding" type of experience on all the different tasks involved, it still gives you the ability to strip out a pretty good checklist of all the things you need to cover off on in order to create an up front costing / level of effort plan that will keep you much closer to the actual cost to deploy the MOSS platform to your organization.