3 Facts We Should Know About Effort Budget

It seems that everything we do in product management, design and development has limits. Resources, time, money, energy. Do you always know what your budget on the project is?

Some issues are more important than others, some things require more time and efforts than others.

The author of the article on Cleverpm.com suggests to clearly understand the amount of effort that you’re expecting to spend on any project.

Budgeting aligns teams

Product Managers used to work with top management, developers, designers, graphics teams, marketing, and so on. Often, these teams don’t have the same understanding of all of the components and context.

Sometimes it results in them putting more effort in than we really wanted them to. It means that other work they need to do gets put on the back-burner.

Product managers provide them with important info to use when planning their work streams. PMs align everyone against a clear and understood standard of work.

Budgeting provides backstops

Establishing a clear effort budget provides product managers and teams with the ability to assess how closely the work being done matches our expectations and estimates of how much would be done.

We all ultimately report to a business that has its own deadlines, expectations, and goals, we simply can’t ask for time, money, and resources based on zero estimations.

We make initial estimates, we start projects, and we hope that those estimates are closer to reality than not.

Budgeting allows corrective actions

Sometimes we should back off the project or even shelve it.  Or we have a need to increase our budget due to new information that we’ve collected.

When we need more effort, or we need to shift priorities, we’re quite in an awkward situation because we didn’t manage expectations from the beginning.