Project Budget Predicting and Tracking

+ Why

Pinning down a project cost, and as a result a yearly budget, for running eDiscovery is no small task. There are numerous factors that need to be taken into account. Some of these factors are going to be more relevant to certain organizations and possibly irrelevant to other organizations. Additionally, some levels of scrutiny or perfection may not be worth the costs of monitoring. For example, is monitoring the cost associated with the collection and processing of an iphone important in the scheme of a multi-million dollar project? It may very well be the most important collection in the entire project, but the strictly budgetary cost of the operational actions are unlikely to be worth keeping a close eye on.

This doesn’t mean that dialing in a super accurate budget projection model isn’t worthwhile, but it’s important to keep in mind the context of where we are in the maturity scale. Trying to get from Managed to Standardized. Trying to get pinpoint accuracy at this stage is somewhere between prohibitively difficult to impossible. Time fretting over this aspect is time that could be well spent improving processes. In fact, improving processes will make it easier to perform the projections/tracking. How? Think back to the audit and how the variations of best practices led to varied lengths of execution time. How much easier is it going to be to predict the cost of your team to perform an action if you know each one is going to take 9-10 minutes compared to each one could take between 9-30 minutes and you're unsure where each one falls in the range… oh and the error potential that could cause an unknown amount of time and money to fix? The former is going to be a lot easier. You may be thinking “most of these costs I am trying to predict are costs outside of my team, how does controlling my team fix this” well first of all we are cleaning up processes and making information more clear/clean for use and that will help. But more excitingly we have steps in the more mature levels of the model that directly work to control costs on outside costs and bringing work in house.

Moral of the story is the more control and improvement, the clearer a picture, and as a result, the easier to predict.

So let’s start with a baseline that is easy to implement and gets us up the maturity scale.

Time break down

1 hour - Project Data Collection

5 minutes - Setup Budget Data Tab

30 minutes - Enter Project Data

15 minutes - Setup Budget Calculations

15 minutes - Setup Budget Predictor

30 minutes - Setup Project Tracker

5 minutes - Setup Budget notes

+ How?