We are often asked for budget figures for future projects, and we know this time of year many of our customers are preparing budgets.
We thought it would be helpful to provide a few budget insights and some pricing guidelines that will help with your planning.
Read on for:
Some of the common errors we see in budgeting
An IT Budget Guide for your project costs.
Common Errors in IT Budgeting
What’s missing?
I can’t count the number of times business units (outside of IT) work to prepare new technology and forget to properly budget for IT costs. The most common underestimations are around:
Integration with other IT systems
Development of user functionality and assistance with change
Management of the project.
If it's possible, work collaboratively and early in the process, with those pulling the budgets together and talk with them about the ‘whole’ project costs that are needed for success.
Don't forget project management
It is tempting to use project management resources from the supplier of the products or services being purchased. These are often bundled in with the overall solution. In our experience, this project management is primarily used to organise supplier resources and tasks and cannot help with your team or internal constraints. Regardless of the project management resource you use, it needs to sit on your side of the business, not the supplier side.
Time is money. Project length that is underestimated at budget time will almost always cost more to complete. Working with the business to move from a ‘tee shirt’ size to a more fully formed project brief or business case helps to ensure sufficient time and effort is allocated during the budgeting process. Alternatively, if you can find someone who has done this work before, they may provide a better guide.
As tempting as it is (to reduce costs) to having your technical people manage their projects, it is not a good idea. Managing technical project issues is not the same as more generally managing the project – they are different skill sets. Technical problems often involve a deep dive into the details and everything else stops while this happens. A dedicated project manager, even in a light touch mode, helps to keep projects moving forward faster, reducing costs, staff stress and getting the benefits of the new solution faster.
Planning for change
When planning for change there are several items that are helpful to do up front. Busy IT teams know this but can get distracted with other work before a project starts. Putting time aside to plan for technical changes makes the actual change faster and less stressful.
Here are some examples this:
Ensure there is a clear benefit to change is standard work for IT teams, but measuring these benefits can be forgotten. This is especially so if a project is implemented in a “minimal viable product” way. That is, the project does just enough to replace an existing something leaving ‘enhancements’ to a later date. These enhancements may never occur possibly leaving the full benefits of the new technology out of scope
Having a technical plan for high level change means a plan for the detail of change. For example, we are often asked for help to develop a strategy around Unified Comms. When management is planning change, it is easy for forget the detail of component change, from mobile and data suppliers, handsets, contact centres or other complex calling, call flows as well has how new technology may change these things. There is no substitute for spending quality time mapping these out, figuring out the impact on users and how an organisation can best take advantage of new ideas and tech. It helps speed change and removes project risks
Expecting key resources to be available. Often a project requires an important or key person to be available and this isn’t always the case, particularly if that person has a busy operational role. Budgeting costs to either free that person up from their operational role, or provide replacement expertise in the project role is important to budget correctly
One of the most difficult jobs to do at budget time, without getting into the detail of each project, is the understanding the correct sequence projects, that is, understanding project dependencies. This has a major impact on delivery time and costs.
An IT Budget Guide for Your Project Costs
To help you in budgeting effectively for your projects this year, we’ve put together a matrix of costs and estimated timeframes for some most common projects. We hope you find this useful in planning out your projects and budgets for this year.
Click the link to download your IT Budget Guide
If you’d like to talk more about specific pieces of work in your plan, or need more details on any of these items, please get in touch. Call Kerry on 021 436550 or email Kerry.McFetridge@edgeconsulting.nz
We’ve worked with organisations throughout New Zealand and helped them deliver programmes of work on time and on-budget. If you need some external resources or perspectives to help you deliver this year, the Edge team can help.