Budgeting For Success

Budgeting is a critical aspect of effective IT planning.

So, if you’re thinking about funding for new projects, Karen Nelson, managing director of Calibre Secured Networks, offers some advice to ensure your plans add-up.

Prudent budgeting increases the predictability and efficiency of IT planning; driving greater transparency, accountability and collaboration, while also enabling accurate decisions to be made that better support critical business priorities.

Without a budget, you may be forced to request or justify every IT expenditure as it arises, which can generate unnecessary overheads. You can also endup with a patchwork of technologies sewn together from budget products, or worse, stuck with the incumbent supplier simply because they’re cheap or you don’t have the time to shop around for a new one.

Good budgeting involves the process of allocating monetary resources to various IT programmes and projects, and can span recurring expenses such as hardware leases and staffing to expenses dedicated to a fixed-duration project. It should be regarded as a manifestation of your IT strategy – every line on the budget should tell a story that maps back to this.

Budgeting is obviously important, a critical tool for identifying and executing the IT initiatives that will power your projects in the months ahead. Your budget should provide direction as well as a holistic view of your funding requirements. It will let you see whether resources are overstretched in one area or another, and lets you benchmark your spending against similar departments: consider the budget as a tool to prioritise your IT initiatives and validate that your monetary investment matches your strategic priorities.

A well-balanced budget should represent the numeric manifestation of your IT strategy. Consider how deeply the budget can affect your organisation at all levels and devote time and energy into its construction. A good tip is to start developing your new budget immediately the last one has been approved. Make sure you have the wherewithal in place to monitor your spending against last year’s budget as you progress, and as you see variances or ways to allocate funds more effectively, use them as input to an ongoing draft budget.

Also, reviewing the most recent budget will help you to identify those areas that could be reduced or reallocated. If you work for a business that demands justification of every line item, it’s especially important to start selling your budget before you even write the first line, while securing consensus for your IT strategy. It’s always easier to justify project investment at budgeting time when everyone knows its purpose, impact, and objectives, rather than further down the line when people are distracted by other priorities and those unforeseen spending requirements crop-up.

And if you don’t a have an IT strategy already, use the time you have now as an effective opportunity to craft an outline plan to help secure your budget – if you have a cohesive and well-conceived plan, the money to execute that plan is less likely to be questioned.

Finally, if you are required to make significant reductions in various areas of proposed budget, always make sure that you highlight the capabilities that will be affected by the cuts. As you review the budget, remember it’s a prioritisation of initiatives and capabilities as opposed to simply a pot of money for your department. Remember that the closer you can map your budget to past results, the easier it will be to justify future expenditures.

Partnering with an adept, nimble-footed provider enhances success when it comes to delivering IT, facilitating cost savings that one-off or regular purchases simply can’t match. It can serve you well through the provision of objective, high quality advice around the implications of legislative changes such as GDPR. Measuring performance levels and KPIs are also easier with the guidance and objectivity of an external partner.