Project Management

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The Money Files

A blog that looks at all aspects of project and program finances from budgets, estimating and accounting to getting a pay rise and managing contracts. Written by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.

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How healthy are your project finances?

Categories: financial management

OK, we’re part way through the year and the reforecasting is already upon us! Unless your budgets have been managed to the penny and everything is on track, chances are you are probably facing some reforecasting for the remainder of the year.

In my experience, many project managers are accountable for budgets but lack confidence in financial health – it’s one of the things I talk to project managers about in my mentoring calls a lot. But the thing is that financial problems rarely appear suddenly. They creep in quietly, in a little overspend here or there, or a supplier delay that doesn’t feel like a lot until it’s pushed your spend into next month and you’re dealing with accruals.

So April is an ideal moment for a quick, painless financial health check before issues harden into forecasts.

What do we mean by financial health?

I mean not the easy question of “Are we on budget?” but the rounded questions about

How predictable is our spend?
How confident are we in the forecasts?
How aligned are we between cost, scope, and progress

Because a project can be on budget and still financially unhealthy. So you need to look at it in the round.

What to look for

You’re looking for:

Actuals consistently lagging or jumping month to month, especially if you find they aren’t submitted in time so they are regularly pushed into next month to show up in the accounts.
Forecasts being reworked without clear reasons (not pointing the finger at any particular team…)
Commitments not reflected in the cost report, although this depends on how you manage your accounting for projects – what you do want to do is share visibility of upcoming costs
Heavy reliance on contingency, because that’s what it’s there for, right?!

In my mind, the worst is when the sponsor is surprised by numbers that the project manager thought were understood. Because that’s a massive disconnect between what you thought you were managing to and what they think is going to happen.

However, these are not mistakes, they are signals that help you understand what to tweak to get the project finances back under control.

How to get started

It’s not that difficult, as long as you put some time aside to work through what your project finances currently look like.

For example:

Reconcile actuals vs planned spend and check everything is as you expect
Sense-check remaining work vs remaining budget and reassure yourself that there is enough money to keep the project afloat until the end!
Review assumptions behind the forecast and validate them (and ask for more money if necessary, if they turn out not to be true)
Check alignment between schedule milestones and cost profile, and link in with the finance team to check on the cash flow implications
Confirm who actually owns financial decisions, because it probably isn’t you when all is said and done. And it’s really helpful to know who you have to pitch recommendations to.

Finances on projects is not just about reporting. It’s also about control, and the reports are one thing and yes we need them, but the data in the reports is how you make better choices about how to run the project.

Don’t leave financial conversations too late. That’s putting off conflict or challenge because numbers feel uncomfortable, and I promise you can get better at project financial management, even if you were rubbish at Maths at school.

Financial control is part of professional project leadership, and there are experts in your organisation with letters after their name who can help. You simply have to ask the right questions and have an idea of what you want to be seeing. And if you don’t see that, you’ll need a few ideas about how you could influence the numbers to bring them more in line with everyone’s expectations.

Small, regular checks prevent uncomfortable conversations later, and are far easier to manage than the change control process where you have to go back asking for more money close to the end. The most important thing is that your numbers are trusted, so start from there, getting accurate data and then see what it’s telling you.

Posted on: April 23, 2026 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Is it time to rethink your PM career path?

Categories: Career Development

There’s something about spring that makes me want to rethink everything – maybe it’s the fact that everything seems to be renewed, I know this is not an original thought!

What it means for us at work is that I am hearing a lot of people talking about taking a moment to think about their career. Especially for those of us who are slightly older, we don’t want to end up with career drift instead of career choice. We want career moves to be meaningful and part of a rounded picture for the direction we want to take, instead of simply floating into the next role because it’s offered.

Staying busy is good, but not at the expense of ending up somewhere you never expected to go.

But it’s difficult to ‘plan’ your career

The trouble with career reassessment exercises, or even a simple reflection on a Friday night with your favourite drink, is that the project management culture values resilience and ‘pushing through’. We are the doers, the people who drive change and get things done. Yes, there is of course space for lessons learned and reflection in the role, but there is a worry about appearing uncommitted if you are actively talking about career reflection and whether or not you are in the right place. It’s the conversation we need to have outside of our immediate line management team or colleagues because you never know, it might not come to anything.

Also, I think in project management there is a lack of clear alternative paths. Unless you are up for taking larger and more strategically important (and therefore stressful projects), where do you go?

What’s right for you?

Think about these questions:

What work energises me now? What work drains me? Where am I adding the most value?

And then think about your skills: What skills am I underusing? What do I want less of?

The GROW Model is a good starting point as well. It stands for:

Goal
Reality (i.e. your current situation)
Options (to get from current situation to your goal)
Will (as in, what will you do now?)

I know a lot of people are low-level job hunting for a portion of their time and if the perfect job came up, they’d jump ship. So you need to know what you are looking for in case it falls in your lap.

Where could you go?

There are lots of job titles now that are PM-adjacent including:

Delivery specialist
PMO / portfolio roles
Product-adjacent work
Change and transformation
Coaching and mentoring

You can look for roles that cover any of those aspects, or you might choose to go into an operational or line job.

Chat to your mentor

If you have a mentor, this is exactly the kind of thing your mentoring relationship is for. You should be able to talk to them informally, in confidence, about what you are thinking with regards to your current role. And any future role you might have in mind.

They are not decision-makers in your life, but they will have an interesting perspective and can probably share some of their own thoughts from their career choices.

If you don’t have a mentor, there are probably colleagues you trust, or friends or family members you could discuss with, or even type your thoughts into ChatGPT or Copilot (but take the output with a pinch of salt!).

Career reflection is something we should all be doing because time passes quickly, and you want to steer your ship in the right direction for you. Don’t get me wrong, that direction is likely to change over time, but it’s better to have a loose plan than no plan at all. And project managers are great at planning, right?

Posted on: April 13, 2026 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A Change Manager’s guide to spring resets

Categories: Teams

We’ve had the delivery pressure of Q1 and now April is here! Where I am in the northern hemisphere that means we are starting to see warmer weather and everything feels lighter and nicer, and that includes work. Somehow, it’s not so hard to get through the back to back meetings when the sun is shining outside the office window.

April is a bit a breather after the struggle to get through Q1, but it also comes with the pressure of knowing that a big chunk of the year has already gone. So here’s what to do – don’t panic!
Many teams push on instead of pausing to recalibrate, that doesn’t have to be you. You can pause here, regroup after the first three months of the year and think about what intentional change you want to manage for your team.

Let’s start with the signs to look out for.

Warning signs

Look out for change fatigue showing up as disengagement or cynicism – people who roll their eyes when you talk about the plans for the year.

Another thing to put on your worry list is multiple initiatives competing for the same attention. There’s only so much change an organisation can deal with at any one time, and if you failed to land some biggies in Q1, that has just squeezed the change window into the remaining nine months.

Talk to the PMO or project leaders and get a sense of how they are feeling, are they OK to pause if they need to, or are we into the “Everything is priority one” syndrome?

How to reset

As a change manager, you have the power to help teams reset. It doesn’t mean stopping all the work or rebranding problems as “opportunities”. It’s about clarifying priorities for the rest of the year, the pace and the purpose. It’s about explaining what teams can manage to take onboard and resetting expectations with stakeholders.

Practical reset opportunities

I know I’ve used the word ‘opportunity’ there, but I don’t mean it negatively, I promise! Here are 5 things you could do if you know your teams are struggling and we’ve still got a lot of the year left to go.

Pause low-value change activity. Can it wait? Does it have to be done at all? There might be some things you can take off people’s plates that everyone will benefit from.

Reconfirm what success looks like now. Success might look different now to what it did when you first set these targets. Maybe you need a bit more benchmarking, or maybe other projects have shifted the art of the possible so you can set more challenging targets.

Simplify governance temporarily. I am not going to make any friends for saying that, but it will make a difference! Ditch what you can.

Talk to stakeholders. Remind them why you do what you do. Talk to them about expectations and how they sit within the wider programme of change across the organisation. Just because they have expectations doesn’t mean you can meet them, and it’s better to get that out in the open now rather than closer to the delivery date.

Give teams psychological permission to say “this isn’t working”. We had a long talk in my team about psychological safety at the start of the year, and it’s something we’re actively working on. Assess how your teams are feeling and what you can do to make it safer and easier for them to express concerns in a way that is listened to (and feels listened to).

As a change manager, you have the option to lead in a calm, considered way, it’s a leadership choice. We don’t need panic, and project managers are the same. We should be the stabilising influence on the team, even when everything is changing around us. We don’t just drive the change, we help people through it, and that’s a real skill.

Posted on: April 06, 2026 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Tools and strategies for validating and auditing project data

Oh my – projects create a lot of data. If you’ve been around projects for any amount of time (or read my previous articles on data management) then you’ll know that it’s really important what you do with that data.

By project data in this sense, we’re talking about the data about managing the project – the performance management data you collect and use to course correct. Your project might also create data as a deliverable, for example customer records or staff records, or financial data. But what we are talking about here is the performance management of the project – the kind of data that the PMO wants to audit from time to time to ensure you are sticking to the process.

Data validation tools

Data validation tools are what you can use (and they might already be set up in the system) to make it easier to ensure that the data meets certain criteria. Two easy ones are:

Data validation rules: Implementing built-in validation rules in your project management tools (e.g. ensuring budget figures are positive numbers or task deadlines are not in the past). That can prevent incorrect data entry or flag up when things look off.

Automated checks: Use software that automates validation processes, checking for discrepancies in data consistency, format, or compliance with predefined standards. For example, project codes might need to be 5 digits, or the project sponsor name might be chosen from a drop down list. These can be automatically checked at the point of entry by limiting the entries, or you can run reports in the background.

Auditing and monitoring

Audit logs: Enable audit logs in your project management tool to track changes made to the project data, including who made the change, what was changed, and when it was changed. Then you can trace discrepancies and identify the source. You might need PMO-level access to see the logs, but that’s OK, it’s normally the PMO team who would want to do the auditing anyway.

Data quality dashboards: Use dashboards that monitor the quality of project data. For example, what % of fields are filled in on a resource request? How many dependencies are in the average project schedule? How many risks haven’t been updated this month? This gives you insights into who is actually updating the project management software, and the quality of what they are putting in there.

Regular data audits

These are your normal project health checks or peer reviews, but in my experience they often stop happening after a brief fluffy of being booked in at the beginning of the year.

Periodic data reviews: The PMO can schedule regular data reviews to manually check the consistency and accuracy of project data, especially after major milestones or changes. As a project manager, you can also ask for a data review if you think it will help you maintain the accuracy and completeness of your data.

Cross-department audits: In larger projects, ask cross-functional teams (e.g. finance, operations, and HR) review project data for consistency and accuracy. Ideally, everything that’s held should be the same as what other departments are saying it is – in other words, data should align across departments. Check everyone is working off the same documents and schedules. You’d be surprised at how often one team is working off something that is out of date!

These are only a few strategies and ideas for auditing and validating the data in your project management systems – and they mostly require input from other humans on the team. If you are in a PMO role, try to build these into your annual cadence of checks and balances. As a project manager, do your best to stay on top of the data you create for performance tracking and keep everything as tidy as possible.

Posted on: March 17, 2026 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Project management lessons unwrapped: 10 Things I learned in 2025

Categories: Lessons Learned

OK, I know we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the year, but it takes time to do the work to reflect. And if you’ve read my previous posts from earlier this year, you might have picked up that there’s been a lot going on.
Before we move into the second quarter of the year (which here in the UK is the first quarter of the financial year – so there’s that), I wanted to share my takeaways from 2025 to see if there’s any that resonate with you.
And if you haven’t had time to properly digest the end of last year (or the beginning of this one), take this as a sign that it’s worth putting the effort in.

Here are 10 gifts I got to unwrap last year – the lessons we can all share with our teams.

The gift of focus

I know in the workplace we don’t get to say no to work, but in my personal life I was able to say no to low-value work. We outsourced cleaning and now have a lovely cleaning team, for example. I said no to several speaking engagements that required overseas travel. And at work, I did have conversations with my management team about the projects I enjoyed and what I felt I could take on, which helped me focus on the projects that made best use of my skills.

The gift of a clear brief

Having clear instructions is so important – I see this with my children! When I ask them to contribute to household chores, they are still at the age where they need very clear instructions. Giving and receiving clear briefs saves so much time.

The gift of patience with stakeholders

Stakeholders are busy. Let’s assume their actions come from a good place, because I’m 99.9% sure that they do. A little bit of patience – and factoring in lots of time for their response – is just being kind.

The gift of humour during chaos

Being able to laugh together and to see the funny side of events is really important for team morale. I can’t share the exact moments I’m thinking of, but being able to emotionally regulate in a way that brings others along with you is really helpful.

The gift of templates and checklists

I love a good checklist! This year my goal is to checklist-ise even more of my day job, especially month-end processes. Templates (basically the last project documents I created for the project that’s a little further on in the process) are a lifesaver when you need to get a new piece of work off the ground quickly.

The gift of clear communication

I have valued the times that stakeholders have been clear with what they want to see in steering decks, or communications materials, or in reporting. That saves everyone time. And I hope I communicate clearly to my colleagues too.

The gift of teamwork

I’m lucky to work with some amazing people, who have positive attitudes to their work and are proactive – being in a time like that, knowing that people have your back, is really important for wellbeing and psychological safety.

The gift of adaptability

Flexibility isn’t just a buzzword. How many times did you have to pivot in the last 12 months because your project team changed, or world events through everything for a loop, or the organizational objectives changed? We just have to be adaptable – it’s not an option.

The gift of reflection

I’m lucky enough to have had colleagues who have provided me with performance feedback, and to have had the time to reflect on that. One of my project teams last year was also the absolute best for capturing lessons learned as we went through the process – we ended up with some meaningful improvements we can action.

The gift of optimism for what’s next

2026 is already here, and really, who knows what the next few months – or years – will bring? While there is a lot of uncertainty, coming from a place of optimism rather than despondency is going to help me and the project teams I work with. Look for the good.

Posted on: March 10, 2026 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)