The Money Files

I get it. Managing project budgets is daunting when you start out. Suddenly, someone is giving you thousands to track and manage. You’re approving invoices for more than the cost of your household monthly outgoings.

I was lucky in that when I was very junior in my career, my manager gave me the job of tracking the project spending on a larger project. He was the main project manager, and I was part of the project team, managing smaller initiatives, a workstream, and the budget and risk management. Probably because no one else wanted those jobs! They aren’t the most glamourous part of project management, but the experience actually served me very well for the future.

I got used to the scale of the numbers we were dealing with.

But you have to start somewhere, and like me, you need to get your hands stuck into managing budgets before you get confident with the methods used for tracking, monitoring and controlling project finances.

When you’re starting out, you might need a bit of support with the processes and techniques for budget tracking. The infographic below shares 6 places you can go for help. Of course, you can also talk to your manager or mentor as the first point of call. There are lots of places to get help if you are new to project budgeting, and plenty of people prepared to give advice! After all, the business has a vested interest in you learning more and being able to manage the money confidently!

There’s more information about where to go for help with project budgeting (including some ideas of my favourite books) in this article.

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It’s time for part 5 of our journey through the Scope Management Knowledge Area from the PMBOK® Guide-- Sixth Edition, although it does feel like once I’ve got through the whole PMBOK® Guide we’ll be on the Seventh Edition, as I know that will be with us before we know it.

Anyhow, today, we’re looking at the Validate Scope process.

You can find the previous parts here:

• Plan Scope Management
• Collect Requirements
• Define Scope
• Create WBS

This will be a super-short look at the process, because there haven’t been many changes and it’s a pretty simple process.

The Validate Scope Process

This is the fifth process in the Knowledge Area. We have moved from the Planning process group to the Monitoring and Controlling process group.

What we’re doing at this point in the project is formalising the process of acceptance. As we’re in Monitoring and Controlling, we’ve got to the point in the project where something has been delivered. Now we have to check whether we’ve delivered the right thing.

Basically, you review the deliverable with the person responsible for approving it, and receive formal sign off. When you’re doing this process in real life, it’s likely to overlap with with the Control Quality process, because you have to check the deliverables match the defined quality standards before you ask a sponsor to sign them off.

So now we know what this process is all about, let’s look at what we need to perform it.

Inputs

There isn’t much that has changed from the Fifth Edition. Instead of requirements documentation and requirements traceability matrix, we just have project documents. No biggie. That means the inputs to this process are:

• Project management plan
• Project documents
• Verified deliverables i.e. ones that have been through the quality processes
• Work performance data – personally I think it’s a bit vague as to why you would need this, but it could overlap with quality requirements and the example given in the PMBOK® Guide is that of documenting number of validation cycles and nonconformities. So you could find it useful in a discussion with a project sponsor, I suppose.

Tools & Techniques

Group decision making techniques has dropped off the list of Tools and Techniques, to be replaced by generic decision making (which includes, of course, techniques for groups to make decisions like voting).

Personally, I can’t think of many (any?) situations where my project quality would be assessed by vote. The deliverable either meets the criteria or it doesn’t. However, the PMBOK® Guide does list voting as a way to reach a conclusion when “the validation is performed by the project team and other stakeholders.”

Alongside that, we also have inspection (as previously in the Fifth Edition).

Outputs

Once again, there are no new or changed outputs to this process.

The outputs are:

• Accepted deliverables
• Work performance information
• Change requests
• Project document updates.

Of these, the most important for me is the accepted deliverables. The formal documentation for sign off of a deliverable is used later in the process for closing down the project, because you can’t close a project if the deliverables haven’t been accepted.

Next time I’ll be looking at the sixth and final process in this Knowledge Area: Control Scope.

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Getting a handle on risk is so important when it comes to keeping your project under control.

There are plenty of different ways to categorise and think about risk, and today’s video considers three ways you can group risk:

• Hazard risk
• Control risk
• Opportunity risk.

Watch the video below and then let me know – do you agree with these categories, or do you use a different way of bundling your risks together?

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When your project is making a tangible financial contribution to the company’s profit or revenue, then putting your business case together is pretty easy. If the financial case stands up, many execs will put a tick in the box. But when you can’t demonstrate that there are financial reasons to do your project, should you put the business case in the bin?

No, of course not. There are lots of non-financial reasons to invest money in a project. And some of them might even pay back in cash! It’s just that measuring them and attributing the benefit specifically to your project could be difficult to do.

Here are 5 common non-financial benefits that you could consider adding into your business case, even if there are plenty of cash benefits too.

There’s more information about the concepts of non-financial benefits in this article.

So you’re a new member of the Project Board? And wondering how to approve funding for the project?

Come in, sit down, let me tell you what to expect!

First, you should know that every project-led organisation tends to do things in a slightly different way, and managing money is no exception. So you’ll need to find out exactly how your PMO process works for project funding. What I’ll describe here is a generic, common process. There might be unique tweaks for your environment, depending on how your PMO and exec team work together, what country you are in, whether you are a non-profit, and so on.

But broadly, this is how project funding approvals work.

Funding in principle: the business case

Projects start with a good idea, which is summarised and explained in the business case. At this point, senior decision makers will choose to accept (or reject) the project. If it goes ahead, they’ve approved the funding in principle, even though no one actually gets the money to spend at that time.

Typically, projects are prioritised by importance and need, so your project might not get started for a few more months. When the time comes for your project to start, the project moves into project initiation (kick off) and work can begin.

Stage budgets

Budgets are typically handed out in phases. If you have a 5-year project, for example, you won’t get handed all the cash on Day 1. That’s bad business planning because there might be other things you can be doing with the Years 2-5 money right now. Plus, I expect it would give your business a massive cashflow problem to tie up money for that length of time when you aren’t forecasting to spend it for ages.

So money is dripped out, normally linked to the project stage.

When the project begins, you’re in the kick off and planning phase, so the money is allocated for the planned work happening in the current phase.

When you reach the end of this phase, you’ll move into the next phase of the project. There’s normally a Project Board meeting or other approval point, at which everyone agrees that the project is on track, going to deliver what it said it would, and it’s worth carrying on with the work.

You approve the project to continue, and that is the milestone that releases the next wave of funding for the next phase of planned work.

Change budgets

You’ll also be asked, in your capacity as a Project Board member, to have some degree of oversight over the change budget.

Change budgets are money set aside to pay for changes. The project budget only covers the planned work. Changes – the clue is in the name – are changes to the original scope that you didn’t know about at the time of planning the original budget. And normally changes cost more. You’re either paying to redo work, or to increase the scope and add extra stuff in.

The change budget is there to cover the cost of changes. The Project Board can sign off on a change and release the money from the change budget to pay for it.

Note: the change budget isn’t there as a lovely cushion for overspending. If the project manager asks to dip into it but there isn’t actually an associated change, then your answer should be no. It’s not there to fund general bad planning. If no one requests a change, then you can’t spend it!

Risk budget

The final type of budget that the Project Board will get involved with is the risk budget. Again, this is a budget only to be used for certain things, not as a slush fund to dip into whenever you feel like the project needs a bit extra to help get over a challenge.

The risk budget is to pay for risk management activities and the impact of risk. Once a risk has been identified, and the financial impacts of it are known, the project manager can ask the Project Board to approve spending. The money goes towards taking steps to mitigate or better manage the risk in some way. Or it could be used to pay for whatever is needed at the point the risk occurs.

Don’t let project managers spend it without it being attributed to a specific risk management task! And if you are feeling really strict (or if your PMO dictates) you shouldn’t use the risk budget for any risk other than the one that was specifically allocated at the time.

Personally, that final clause feels a bit draconian, but look at your local rules.

So that begs the question: if you can’t use change and risk budgets to deal with things other than changes and risks, what happens when the project goes over budget?

Great question!

You decide. The Project Board either needs to decide that the project is “worth” the extra and puts extra money into the project. Or it decides the business can’t fund that. Your business is not an unlimited pot of money. Being careful with how it is managed is the only way to ensure more projects come in on budget, every time.

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