Key Strategies to Improve Your IT Budget Forecasting
Accurately forecasting IT budgets can be a difficult task, but it’s essential for ensuring that your organisation has the resources it needs to support its technology initiatives. With the right strategies, however, you can ensure your IT budget forecasts are reliable and up-to-date.
1. Start early
It is never too early to start planning and forecasting your IT budget. The earlier you start, the more time you will have to review and adjust your projections. This also gives you time to identify and address any potential challenges before they become bigger issues.
2. Gather data
To make accurate IT budget projections, you need to have a solid understanding of your current and historical spending patterns. Gather data on your current IT expenses, including hardware, software, maintenance, and support costs. This information will help you identify trends and make more informed projections.
3. Consider future projects
When forecasting your IT budget, it's important to consider any upcoming projects or initiatives. This will help you identify the resources you will need to allocate to these initiatives, and ensure that you have the budget to support them.
4. Engage with stakeholders
Collaboration is key to successful IT budget forecasting. Engage with stakeholders across the organisation, including business leaders, IT professionals, and finance teams. This will help you get a better understanding of the organisation's short-term and long-term goals and technology needs, and ensure that your budget aligns with those needs.
5. Consider the impact of emerging technologies
Emerging technologies are changing the way we work, and it's important to consider the impact they will have on your IT budget. Consider investing in technologies that can help you improve efficiency, reduce costs, and support your organisation’s goals.
6. Be flexible
Technology is constantly changing, and your IT budget should reflect this. Be prepared to make adjustments to your budget as needed, and be open to new ideas and solutions that can help you better manage your technology costs.
7. Monitor performance
Regularly monitoring the performance of your IT budget is essential for ensuring that you are on track to meet your goals. Track your spending, identify areas where you can make cost savings, and adjust your budget accordingly. Automation tools can help you to track and analyse spending trends, identify areas of improvement, and create what-if scenarios to better anticipate costs associated with future initiatives.
Why doesn’t my IT budget ever go to plan?
There are three main reasons for discrepancies in budget forecasting for technology. Read on for a breakdown of the top issues and how to address them.
1. Unexpected IT expenses
First, it helps to identify where you are blowing your IT budget. Often IT budget inaccuracies can be traced back to unexpected tech expenses. Repairs, replacements, and unanticipated upgrades can all throw your budget out of whack. Unfortunately, emergency repairs and last-minute technology improvements are the most costly.
But without a crystal ball, you can’t predict what’s going to happen, right? Still, you can make a plan that avoids wasting money on the old break-fix model. With our Managed Services packages, we’ll work proactively to prevent unexpected system downtime, protect you from cyber-attacks, and keep software and hardware updated and patched. And if something does go wrong, you’ll receive priority support from IT experts ready to address the issue.
Plus, we’ll help determine the expected life cycles of your tech assets. That way, you can anticipate hardware or software upgrades and budget accordingly.
2. Bloated IT infrastructure
Overlapping and wasted resources are another big IT budget drain. You could be paying for many devices that do the same thing, or you may be continuing to license software that your team no longer uses. Or it may be software that everyone uses, and you could be getting a much better deal. You might also be paying for tech you haven’t upgraded, so you aren’t getting the full return on your investment.
We can help identify these kinds of issues by providing an objective view of your infrastructure. We can propose performance improvements and streamline processes, and may also be able to suggest subscriptions or other packages that can help you save funds.
3. IT and business misalignment
As we mentioned above, the plan is always to build a budget for an IT strategy that helps achieve business goals. Doing so depends on your tech know-how and good communication.
Furthermore, tech-business alignment has grown more difficult as infrastructure has changed, plus, the workforce is now more distributed. You may have on-premises technology as well as cloud-based software. Your staff could be bringing in their own devices and/or working remotely. As a result, business tech needs to be doing more. Plus, it needs to keep up with rapid evolutions and cyber-security threats.
Investing in IT-business alignment improves budgets, and benefits both your team and your customers.
Swerve can help you to bridge business acumen and IT expertise. Then, you can better calculate the financial impacts (costs and ROIs) of your IT plan.
Need help understanding IT budget pitfalls and spending benchmarks? We can help plan for tech spending that supports your business objectives going forward. Book a call with us now or email it.help@swerve.nz.
