Despite continued economic growth, much uncertainty & restraint remains in spending plans across industries. Corporate boards continue to expect their organizations to do more with less….
This year, stakeholders should expect rigorous budgeting exercises, they’ll need to prepare strong business cases to receive funding for even the most critical projects. Here’s a few hints in what you can do to prepare for a successful budgeting cycle.
- Think strategically – Establishing a vision for how your business needs to evolve the lines to market differentiation, revenue growth, or margin improvement can help gain influential allies and drive the perception of urgency within boardrooms.
- Leverage IT pressures around modernization – IT leadership is facing substantial pressures to enhance security, leverage cloud capacities, and pivot to 0 growth IT spending. Underlying efforts being driven by the software vendor ecosystem focused on modernization introduce near term roadblocks and long-term opportunities to these objectives. Gaining mind share with IT leadership as to how to navigate the uplift of application architectures to support its goals and deliver additional value to the business Can provide insight into collective prioritization of road map initiatives and provide a better understanding of achievable budgetary requests as well as how to plant seeds for future budgeting cycles.
- Financial justification – While I am a firm believer that good leaders buy into vision, it must be recognized that the most effective approach for ganging buy in on budgetary requests is always a strong business case. Educating non practitioners on the challenges and the opportunities that underlie special projects and IT investments will undoubtedly smooth the path to approvals on budgetary asks for high value initiatives.
- Articulate value to the business. While financial impacts undoubtedly speak for themselves it is always beneficial 2 provide a feel-good message for budgetary requests. Articulating the resulting impacts of a proposed initiative on the customer experience, or better yet business enablement, or the impacts on internal resources, community, environment, etc always gives leadership additional ammunition to claim success in driving a customer centric and socially responsible business.
