Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success

Chapter 8. Budget to the Board

Budgeting is often done backwards on technology projects. Managers use deadline dates to backtrack durations, then expense resources over that time frame, and perhaps factor in some known ancillary cost; from there, a budget is born. Upper-level management will often evaluate this budget not on its reflection of scope but on its compatibility with the deadlines and the organization’s spending thresholds. If it falls within those bounds, it’s deemed worthy. In fact, however, budgets created this way are likely to be significantly over- or understated, with understating the more likely of the two. One reason why technology projects commonly overshoot spending projections is that this backwards approach to the budgeting ...