Why Are My Project Teams Always Over Budget???

You’re not the first, but let’s try and make you the last

As leaders of organizations — or even individuals within organizations — we all have goals and budgets. We estimate time and cost and then try and work within those constraints to make a profit. But what if we can’t or aren’t? What if our teams aren’t either?

Imagine you are a leader at a small to mid-sized creative design firm. Your company is organized into teams ranging in size from 2–6 people, one team per project or client. Two of your seven teams exceed their budget on every project.

Despite many conversations with the team members to discuss budgets and project and work best practices, two of the teams continue to exceed their project budgets. You just can’t figure out what’s going on. Journey Maps can help you get to the root of the problem and understand what’s happening.

In the case of our over-budget teams, we’ll start mapping their journey when a project comes in. We’ll assume key information, such as who the client is, the type of project, and at least an idea of what the client is looking for, is known:

We continue mapping this journey by adding the activities or events the team participates in. For our creative design firm, this may include preparing templates, having kick-off meetings, designing and drawing, client meetings, internal reviews, revisions, etc. Whatever activity the team is doing should be added to the journey:

This example shows some of the possible activities. Once you have the basics, go through and review it. For example:

• Did the team have enough information when they started?
• How much time was spent or billed to the project at various stages in the journey? Is that the right amount of time?
• What is the impact of something like a scope change on the team?
• Is the team spending their time on the right work? Are they meeting with the client often enough to get feedback before they’ve gone too far?
• Do you have too many people in meetings or reviews, and the team uses up billable hours without getting much value?

Add any additional details where they are relevant, for example, time spent on something or the number of attendees at a meeting. Keep it high-level enough to be usable but with the right amount of detail to be helpful. Remember, the purpose of mapping this journey is to discover why a project team is always exceeding its budget.

Once the information is shown along the journey, you can look at it and consider what the core of the problem might be:

• Maybe you were underestimating the amount of work needed and your fees are too low.
• Maybe the team is spending too much time designing without sharing it with the client for feedback, causing an excessive number of changes late in the project.
• Maybe the team is billing time to this project because they don’t have anywhere else to put it. This means it’s not a project problem; it’s a culture and behavior problem.
• Maybe the team is starting to work before they have enough information causing lots of throw-away work.

There may be many other possible reasons why they’re going over budget, but using a Journey Map is the easiest and fastest way to uncover a true problem instead of trying to treat the symptoms. Once you’ve identified the problem, you can create a plan to address it, saving you time, money, and effort.

If you’re interested in learning more about Journey Maps or how design thinking tools and techniques can help you or your organization, follow us here, subscribe to our Substack, or check us out at NorthomeGroup.com.

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