How many projects have you worked on where, before the project has even kicked off or, started sprinting, everyone from mid-level management to the developers, UX engineers , scrum masters. project managers and BA/SA and QA analysts are asking “who’s funding this?” It’s almost always followed by “If no one is funding this we shouldn’t or can’t work on it.” I applaud good project budget management embraced by a team. The timing and the audience is what concerns me. There appears to be a growing disconnect between understanding what is and isn’t a real program or project and it’s stalling team progress. I believe the problem can be solved by turning the budget planning over to the working team members. Managements role would be to mentor and guide the the ones who have to commit to the work on how to prepare a budget plan.
Avoid making a bad budget plan everyone’s problem by involving the resources who do the work (a development team for example) that can learn how to create a budget plan. They will manage to their own plan better than someone else’s. The team members involved should be capable of delivering quality work. There is no real gain in trickling down the inner working of the budget process to all of the working team members. You have to strike a balance while also not relying on your ‘gut’ too much.
What’s happening now?
Budgeting is done by only senior level management. The team members see a final budget number later after a list of new work is published.
Considering that the ability to estimate can be further eroded by policies that undermine the process of budgeting resource managers are trying to manage to, one could say that the accuracy workers hours of allocation in a budgeting tool are mostly intuition with a little luck thrown in.
There are a myriad of reasons as to why this is happening. Here’s a typical scenario in seven steps:
1)a senior manager has five team managers each with 5 employees
2)the sr. mgr. must ensure that all of his team managers are allocating all of their employees at 100% capacity.
3)since most projects cannot keep one person on them @100% allocation, the 5 team managers spread each employee across multiple projects with the goal of achieving 100% assigned to budgeted work.
4)fast forward to project planning – the scrum master takes the backlog and starts the sprint planning with the team.
5)the individual team members are asked to give their high level effort estimations for the tasks they are going to work on.
6)team members ask for a budget code to bill to which shows an allocation that was established with no prior knowledge of the work.
7)the project begins and the budget is now being tracked against numbers based on deploying resources to meet a 100% allocation requirement found nowhere in the effort based estimation of the work.
In this scenario, you can clearly see how the allocation of budget is completely disconnected from the effort estimated by the team members. Before your company ‘digs’ into effort estimation numbers and tries to make a one to one connection by tying it back to the budget there’s a couple of caveats you might want to share with them.
There is hope. Early planning by the team members that will be doing the work in collaboration with the budget planning process is a viable option to consider. In fact, it will build earlier commitment to a project since the team was a part of the actual budget estimation. The tools we have today can aid in the collaboration process. Currently, most companies do not leverage or include the right people, process or, the tools to achieve better budget planning results.
qualitasrebus 