Budget. Budget. Budget.
Every client wants to have the smallest budget possible with the greatest return. So the question is what makes up a budget?
- Resource time – the actual time a person spends on the project
- Materials
- Per use costs – any license fees
- Technology development – the cost of development of custom items
- Third party costs – imagery, vendors,
With all of these things in play a client will invariably push back and request that the budget be lower to accommodate their fiscal budget or constraints. The question for us then becomes where do we cut the costs to meet the client requirement of a lower budget.
If you have expected the push back from the client then you have created a budget that you can lower while still having enough money in the budget to allow for the project to be handled correctly. This artificial inflating of budgets is a huge part of the problem. Vendors inflate their budgets in expectation of haggling and clients haggle because they think vendors inflate their budgets.
It’s the chicken and the egg problem all again.
As a vendor we owe our clients honesty in our budget creation, and honesty to not lower the budget due to the haggle process. At the end of this process the client feels like they have “won” while in fact what they have done removed time from the project, which will make the project suffer from day one.
