The Budget Abides

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The Budget Abides
Brad Egeland (November 5, 2009)

Your management and your clients often have different criteria for judging project success, but the budget is going to get attention from both sides. Here are five ways to keep your project's budget in line with the expectations of both your management and your customers.

As project managers, we’re judged by our company's management using certain criteria and by our project customers often using a very different set of criteria. Our organization's executives want to see on-time, on-budget delivery, change orders, and customer satisfaction (or no customer complaints). Most project customers want to avoid change orders; they want a workable solution upon delivery; and they don’t want to pay too much for it. Many customers are often not as concerned with on-time delivery because they realize that their needs and requests sometimes push schedules out. They are usually more concerned with functionality and cost.

However, one set of common criteria for satisfaction on both the delivery side and the customer side is budget management, which leads to the actual project cost realized by the customer. Manage that budget well and more times than not you’ll come out looking like a successful project manager no matter which side you’re dealing with.

Let’s take a look at five key ways to keep your project budgets in line with plans and expectations.

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