Finally, spend time with other heads of departments. Is it cost savings? If so you may be in a better position to advise where slack could be cut without it affecting educational delivery? Or do they want to achieve more and/or better outcomes for the same investment? Once again, you are likely to be best placed to advise how systems or rules could be adjusted to help achieve this. Do they fully understand how your department works and its needs? Do they realize that a cut in administrative staff would mean that your department would not be able to deliver outcomes which are vital for the organization? Ask them, what they are trying to achieve through the budget process. Second, spend time with the person who has written the first draft. Have you missed or misunderstood a section of the budget – working this section out may reveal that your concerns are unfounded. First, try to gather as much detailed information as you can. What should you do? The answer is to negotiate – but it is best to adopt a more sophisticated approach than simple horse-trading. You think the budget is too low but are not sure what to do. It is budgeting time again and you have been sent a high-level paper outlining your department's budget for the next year and inviting you to a meeting with other heads of departments. On balance, it is probably best to have at least some degree of participatory budgeting in the process. Its downside is that the people on the coalface might not see the bigger picture. Naturally, the main advantage of participatory budgeting is that decision making is partially delegated to those who are closest to the reality of educational delivery. In this form of budgeting, planning is carried out by those who will be responsible for eventually delivering the service and by the senior management team. To overcome this, participatory budgeting has emerged as an alternative. However, its obvious disadvantage is that senior management may not realize what is happening at the coalface and so might come up with a budget that unrealistically ambitious or not challenging enough. It results in a budget that is consistent with the strategic direction of the institution and will typically result in challenging goals that will encourage individual teams to think about how they can stretch themselves. Top-down budgeting involves the senior management team in setting the budget and the budget goals. The advantage of zero-based budgeting is that it forces the stakeholders to cast a critical eye on all activities its disadvantage is that it takes a lot more time. The process involves a screening of all proposed activities and associated expenditures – there are no assumptions. As its name suggests, this form of budgeting involves starting from scratch for each cycle and creating the budget a new each time. However, the disadvantage of using incremental budgeting is that it assumes little or no change and can be a roundabout way of saying, “we are doing things like this because we have always done them like this.” The alternative to incremental budgeting is zero-based budgeting. Incremental budgeting has one key advantage – it is based on previous experience and so unless there has been a transformation in your department, the outcome of the budgeting process is likely to be reasonably accurate. The guidance is aimed not just at budget holders but at all those who are responsible for the delivery of some aspect of education.īeware Relying too Much on the Previous Cycle's Activity and BudgetĪs outlined in the introduction, it is all too common practice to look at last year's activity and budget, reproduce it, and then add to it so that it is in line with inflation and perhaps planned increases in salaries. In this article, we offer guidance to help you plan and manage departmental or project budgets in healthcare professional education. By getting more involved in the management of budgets, you will have the ability to convert what could be merely an academic interest in cost and value into practical activities and subsequent results. At a time of economic recession when all budgets are coming under pressure, such interest is only likely to increase. There is growing interest in the issue of cost and value in healthcare professional education – whereby funders, providers, and consumers of education are keen to ensure that maximum effectiveness, benefits, and/or utility is accrued from investments. What do you do each year when budget time comes around? Do you leave things to the department's management team? Do you look at last year's budget and add a small percentage close to the rate of inflation plus another small percentage which is halfway between hopefulness and expectation? If you adopt either of these tactics, then you may be missing an opportunity to influence what your department does throughout the year.
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