November, 2016
I created the budget planning aid shown below in 2016. My intent was to stimulate internal stakeholders’ thinking about the factors that drive budgetary needs, and thus to avoid natural tendencies to incremental, haphazard budgeting. The worksheet prompts planners to consider a variety of factors under three broad headings:
Environmental Scan
Organizational Assessment
Analysis of Operations & Services
Opportunities to be seized
Threats to be mitigated
Societal, demographic, and technological trends
Enrollment projections/trends
Customer expectations to be met
Emerging or ratified standard (accreditation, professional association, industry)
Benchmarking
Strengths to be enhanced
Weaknesses to be remedied
Decisions associated with end of cycle/contract
Maintenance needs associated with past purchases
Contracts to be migrated to new vendors
Resource surpluses or deficits to be corrected
Assets to be purchased/replaced
Services to be discontinued/downgraded/scaled back
Services to be added/upgraded/improved
In-house functions to be outsourced
Outsourced functions to be brought in house
Click the buttons below to see relevant entries in my bibliography, SmithFile.