Cost and Budget Management

The challenge

• IT is seen as a cost center in most organizations. Your IT spend is fuelled by negative sentiment instead of contributing to business value.

• Budgetary approval is difficult, and in many cases, the starting point is lowering the cost-income ratio without looking at the benefits.
• Provide the right amount of detail in your budgets to tell your investment and spending story. Align it with the business story. Too much detail only increases confusion, too little suspicion.

Our advice

Insight

An effective IT budget complements the business story with how you will achieve the expected business targets.

• Partner with the business to understand the strategic direction of the company and its future needs.
• Know your costs and the value you will deliver.
• Present your numbers and story clearly and credibly. Excellent delivery is part of good communication.
• Guide your company by clearly explaining the implications of different choices they can make.

Impact and results 

• Get a head-start on your IT forecasting exercise by knowing the business strategy and what initiatives they will launch.
• The coffee corner works! Pre-sell your ideas in quick chats.
• Do not make innovation budgets bigger than they need to be. It undermines your credibility.
• You must know your history to accurately forecast your IT operations cost and how it will evolve based on expected business changes.
• Anticipate questions. IT discretionary proposals are often challenged. Think ahead of time about what areas your business partners will focus on and be ready with researched and credible responses.
• When you have an optimized budget, tie further cost reductions to consequences in service delivery or deferred projects, or a changed operating model.

The roadmap

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

Get started

Our concise executive brief shows you why you should develop a budget based on value delivery. We'll show you our methodology and the ways we can help you in completing this.

• Build an IT Budget – Executive Brief (ppt)

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• Build an IT Budget – Phases 1-3 (ppt)

Plan for budget success

• Build an IT Budget That Demonstrates Value Delivery – Phase 1: Plan (ppt)
• IT Budget Interview Guide (doc)

Build your budget.

• Build an IT Budget That Demonstrates Value Delivery – Phase 2: Build (ppt)
• IT Cost Forecasting Tool (xls)

Sell your budget

• Build an IT Budget That Demonstrates Value Delivery – Phase 3: Sell (ppt)
• IT Budget Presentation (ppt)