Budget

How a stable budget work helps you be geared to run a great team

Owning your own budget could really help you and your team to be able to work efficiently and to the point.

The beauty of budgets is that they are decided once per year (and probably negotiated in the end of the year) and the…er…not so nice part is that they will most likely be tried to be cut by your hostile and non-IT affluent CFO that you happen to report to for some weird organisational reason.

To get rid of a lot of issues, including having to explain why your servers needs more CPU (processing power) or disk space to the aforementioned Chief Money Saver, demand to get your own budget. Easy as that. Then you only have to negotiate once (hopefully) per year.

A nice thing about working with Kanban and Agile development processes is that the cost is predictable. Projects always come with great surprises and has never delivered “on time and on scope” (and within cost). This is the classic triple constrain.

If you fix cost and time (12 months…), you can fiddle around with scope. What I'm saying here is that with fixed costs for developers, either as employees, dedicated teams (consultants) our completely outsourced, you can fix the costs.

Making a budget based on predictable monthly costs will make budgeting and the accruals work easy.

Read more in "The CTO Playbook" available on Amazon/Kindle.