IT-Business Articles, Tutorials & Webcasts

Free gateway to global IT-business skills knowledge.

---

---

In this tutorial, we have seen that:

• Budgeting is part of the IT professional’s job
• IT organizations themselves must prove the need for money to fund IT projects / activities; if they don’t, no one else will
• Budgeting is a management tool; budgets are statements of IT project / activity plans quantified in dollar terms
• Budgeting is not accounting
• Senior management wants and needs to know what IT professionals have to say, but in business terms

While IT professionals don’t need to be budget experts, they need to know the basics. The basics include five facts every IT manager should know:

• Budgeting is a process that can work for the IT organization as well as against it
• Budget dollars are limited; managers must assess the best uses of scarce budget resources
• Budgeting is competitive; there are winners and losers
• Improvements in the IT budget process can pay off
• What IT professionals don’t know about budgeting can hurt the IT organization’s budget and credibility

Progressive IT executives recognize that improvements in IT budgeting can help them do their job better. To this end they are making the necessary changes, including:

• redesign of the IT budget process
• building or acquiring software applications to support the process
• training IT managers to write better budget justifications, proposals, and business cases

Others are finding that changes are being imposed from outside the IT organization. Either way, change is coming. IT is too important and costly to be ignored.

Next Steps

You can:

• test yourself through the on-line quiz.
• give us feedback to help us improve the tutorial, or suggest additional topics
• submit questions about this or related topics or contact us for additional information

Please take a few minutes to learn about RMS.

---

What Every Manager Needs To Know About Budgeting, Review

 

 

Return To: