Solutions - Planning and Budgeting

Having a good strategy has never been more important. Ensuring your actions and resources are aligned to properly execute that strategy is critical.

Most budgeting processes today still take the old “rack-and-stack” approach to “rank” projects based on some financial metric like Net Present Value (NPV) or Return on Investment (ROI). Typically, these traditional processes then go down the list and dole out money until they reach a “cut line”, where the money runs out. While this historical approach may seem to work, it wastes resources, is inadequate for today’s complex budgets, and fails to generate buy-in with stakeholders.

Today, budgeting is more than just a financial exercise that focuses on NPV or ROI. It is an ongoing conversation about organizational priorities, business demands, and stakeholder needs. Today’s budgets are large and high volume, and they strive to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously – both quantitative and qualitative objectives. The qualitative objectives have traditionally been ignored by managers, or have been slapped on at the back end of a budget as a last minute attempt to create sense out of a meaningless exercise. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Thus, the qualitative piece can be just as important to your budget decisions as the financial piece.

Expert Choice provides a powerful yet simple resource alignment capability that takes the complexity out of budgeting, and facilitates the best alignment of your initiatives with your goals and objectives. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology, this approach helps you first align your initiatives with your goals and objectives, producing a benefit score. Second, it uses a technique that finds the best mixture of initiatives that will create the most value toward your goals and objectives, while staying within your organizational constraints. This technique, called optimization, has been shown to save organizations tens of thousands – if not millions – of dollars in the first implementation.

At Synth Solutions we can help your team optimize and balance its budgets, and teach you how to do it yourselves on an ongoing basis. Using our BudgetingSynth™ methodology, we take a systems approach to resource allocation that unites the strategic planning process, with budget optimization, budget execution, and performance management – buttoned up tight, to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

We offer several key solutions that help your budget alignment efforts succeed:


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