Project Budgeting Best Practices

Project Budgeting
Jill Mack, South Africa
Project budgeting best practises for me:
- Ensure you have a procurement strategy in place ensuring that you comply with your preferred suppliers.
- Get 3 quotes, evaluate the 3 quotes and appoint the supplier.
- List all cost you intend in the budget for the business case. Get approval for all cost.
- Ensure that you have a change request budget too. This budget is small and caters for all smaller, unknown items that creep in which you are not aware of, but affect your budget.
- Once all of this has been approved in the business case, all your stakeholders are in the loop of all cost.
I am currently working on a office move project but is a failure due to the budget that was not setup properly which has resulted in a budget increase of 4 million - not acceptable.

Why Project Budgeting is Essential
T. Stahl, Canada
Normally, a project is successful when it is:
1. Completed on time,
2. Meeting its requirements, and
3. Completed within budget.
If you go over budget, the project cannot be called successful.
A key prerequisite is to have a clear and complete scope defined, including all deliverables and end products.
Estimates should be provided for discrete scope elements of work, using a Work Breakdown Structure technique.
Then ensure you have a good process and tools to track actuals against budgets for each WBS, and periodically perform an estimate to complete to ensure your budgets are still viable.
Also have a good change control process to track changes to scope that may impact budget.

Project Budgeting
nan zeng, China
It is challenging, but the following efforts may help to make budgeting projects a success:
1. Develop project scopes and cascade it down into WBS as specific as possible so as not to leave any big missing items.
2. Use professional experience, references to other similar projects and expert's advices with up-to-date information and data.
3. Predict risks and uncertainties with best, base and worst scenarios analysis.
4. Put reasonably sufficient buffer in the budget plan.
It would be very difficult to provide an accurate estimate for a big project or a project that may run years before closure. To some extent, it is not a problem of capital availability for the project but how to manage sponsor's expectations. Therefore, the project risks and limiting elements to accuracy need to be communicated well and updated with the sponsors and confirm their buy in on a regular basis.