Preparing IT budgets: play the winning cards
A novel way of helping you with your IT budget preparation
It has been said of budgeting that "there's nothing new under the sun". Nonetheless, we have pulled together much of the key advice on IT budgeting from our research and past experience, in a form that offers an innovative way to tackle the process: a pack of playing cards, with a nugget of budgeting advice on each card. These cards form the first output from our research on
IT Spend: The New Realities.
The ideas
Each card presents an idea that may be useful in preparing your IT budget, or in planning your spending and value delivery - especially in a time of financial pressure. The ideas are culled from a variety of sources, including interviews with senior IT managers, past research reports and from researchers in our own team - but do not expect them to provide instant answers. They are a stimulus to thinking and they have to be applied in the context of your own business.
Use the cards in meetings
The cards serve as an aide-mémoire for the experienced IT manager and they become much more powerful when used in meetings.
- Use them to stimulate discussion.
- Use them to focus discussion on one set of issues at a time.
- Use them to ensure that less experienced people can make an active contribution.
- Use them in breakout groups to develop more specific implementation plans.
- And if the meetings come up with other ideas, so much the better!
The suits
Budgeting requires a balanced approach. If it feels like an exercise in pure cost-cutting, you probably need to step back and ask yourself whether you're paying enough attention to the other dimensions of the problem. To help achieve this balance, we have themed the suits as follows:
Follow the links above to see the messages from each card, together with further relevant information and advice. The most powerful ideas are on the Aces and picture cards but this ordering should be taken only as a rough guide. Circumstances determine what is really important in individual companies.
The Jokers
To complete the pack there are the two Jokers, one summarising the case for understanding the
cost model and the other urging you to create a
value model. Instead of a bridge score card, we have included a list of
strategy hints, providing advice for playing the longer-term budgeting game.
The pack
The pack of cards has been designed to used as a physical pack. You can see all the content on this website, but you will get more value from them if you use the pack itself. Please contact your
regional client manager if you would like to have a pack sent to you.
Good luck!
Budgeting can be a gruelling experience, but it can also be used as an opportunity to launch radical thinking. We hope this pack of cards will make it less stressful and more creative. Please let us know if it helps - and if you come up with any additional ideas, forward them to the
project team and we'll put them on the Web.
Further advice
Please contact the
project team to comment on any of the above, to tell us how these or similar ideas have helped you, or to make additional suggestions.