Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success

The IT Budget and the Bottom Line

Budget fidelity is a different story in the world of corporate IT. Is there any other industry, sophisticated or not, that has the same problem with budgeting that we do? An IT project that runs 20 percent over budget is rarely considered to be compromised—chances are, it’s heralded as a wild success! IT people frequently see budget overruns that hit 40, 70, even 140 percent. Many shops automatically inflate budgets in anticipation of overruns, having so little faith in the reliability of the original estimates. The problems that spring from weak budgeting can touch every facet of a project, and once they’ve surfaced, they usually do. What, then, is the source of this dissonance between projections and realities? ...