Balancing Budgets and Budgeting Time

When starting out a project a key aspect to the project is the projects budget. This affects everything from the quality of the items used, the amount of work that can be done, to the amount of time that can be put on the project.

When planning out a budget to manage all the prices and estimate there are some good rules of thumb to follow. These are

1. Use historical data
2. Reference lessons learned
3. Leverage your experts
4. Confirm accuracy
5. Baseline and re-baseline the budget
6. Update in real-time
7. Get on-track

“Examination of our past is never time-wasting. Reverberations from the past provide learning rubrics for living today.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

Budgeting from previous projects can bring more benefits to current project . As a planner, the project manager needs to review records and historical data of the previous successful projects and look for tools, methods and techniques that have made these projects succeeding. While also looking for things that can be improved upon. Cost estimates, work breakdown structure examples, resource allocation, estimating methods, past project members, budget control tools, etc.This data can all be obtained from successfully completed projects – all this valuable information should be collected and examined, then sorted and filtered, and finally specific solutions and ideas for managing budgeting activities should be generated, considering the critical success criteria and factors.

All this information of past success allows for future success. Especially when being able to gain input from past members of similar successful projects. Being able to not only gain first hand knowledge of past successful events and projects, but what could be improved on them from a human level as well as business level.

The more projects done the more data is given to the project manager to work with when building a baseline budget for any project. Thus hopefully increasing the accuracy of similar projects down the road.

Everything isn’t perfect and sometimes a PM will need to move the needle on their baseline budget. Either because more time/money is needed or additional features wanted to be added by a client or something that’s out of control for both parties takes place. The other extreme is also possible where a project may finish under budget. This is why agile project management are helpful in that there’s fluidity when it comes to making the budget. Allowing everything to get done as is requested.

Work Cited Links
https://www.projectmanager.com/training/create-and-manage-project-budget