Page 106 - Budgeting for Managers

Planning and Budgeting a Project
before, add some extra time. Once we know how long each task
will take, we can add up the times and get the total project work
hours for each person. If we get the hourly rate from Human
Resources, we’ll know the cost of labor. Often, we don’t count
the cost of labor for small projects inside one department. 89
This also begins to build our project schedule or project cal-
endar, which is a timeline saying who will do each job and when
he or she will do it. There’s a lot more involved in creating a
project schedule than we can fit into this book. If you want to
learn more, look for a project management book or class, such
as my Project Success™ series, available at www.qualitytechnol-
ogy.com. Table 5-4, the Project Budget Summary, breaks that
down a little further.
How do we use Table 5-4 (page 90) to create a purchasing
plan and budget? For each of the four rows, we ask what we’ll
need for each task listed on the WBS.
Table 5-5 (page 91) shows the project budget for the first
issue of Customer Delights! For this project, internal staff time
was not considered a project expense.
Normally, we would not include the last column, “Type of
Item.” We added it here to show you how we thought through
the project plan. As an exercise, compare this budget with the
work plan in Table 5-3. If I missed anything, send me an e-mail!

Tracking a Project
In this chapter, we’ve done a lot more than just help you make a
budget. We’ve helped you plan a whole project. You can track
project work done, time, and costs with the tools you see here.
For a simple project where you aren’t counting work time, you
can simply write “done” and a date next to each item when you
finish it. If you have a project team, you should run a weekly sta-
tus meeting and update the list at the meeting. You can follow up
on consulting expenses by sending quick e-mails asking if
everything is on budget. And you can track purchases through
purchase orders. We’ll discuss tracking more in Chapter 9.