Can I have a budget please, I want….

Every year around October/November time life kind of stops for a while at the large banks. You see it’s getting close to budget time, this is the time where write down everything we want, four Sun servers a DL585 and two more headcount.

Getting what you want on the budget is important, so if you know that you will need to replace your servers next year, it’s time to put it on the budget and get it signed off.

Once set the budgets tend to be set in stone, yes there’s the business need part, but in terms of projects, once they are set putting something into the budget will result in something being taken out.

One giant wish list is generated and the account managers/application managers will attempt to get it signed off. When all is done, the debates have been had you result with a budget, a list of projects associated with it, so you’ve got budget allocated of 60k for your servers, whether thats four sun servers or three and a DL585 is up to you.

As part of this you will be given say £400 for people, £100 for servers, £100 for costs, and £200 investment for fixed projects on the list, create capitalmarketspricing.bankname.com website. 

The budgets are done for a reason, to forecast expenditure, to get approvement for investment projects, to try and reduce the number of financial surprises, the number of quick we need a new server to fix production, kind of issue.