It Is an effective method to implement project control by using combination of many input-oriented, process- oriented and output-oriented controls as result, action and personnel controls. The most focus of the control is almost always multi-dimensional and the major axes are time, cost and scope. In some cases, other aspects also are consideration. Measuring “tight budgetary control” In order to capture tight budgetary control, Van deer Steed construct a measurement instrument, which is one of the earliest and most commonly used at the time. It
Included five subcomponents: low tolerance for interim budget deviations, line Item control, Intensity of budget-related communication, emphasis on meeting the budget, and level of tolerance for budget revisions during the year (no support) . Unlike other studies, his literature more concern about “the Junction between corporate management and business unit managers” and his model Is quite a good example to be followed. Research design They selected four almost totally different projects from one business unit , which are two best performing projects and two worst ones.
The management team members include: a senior manager, an account manager, an audit team and a steering committee, and the objective Is to determine what KIDS factors explain the tightness of that budgetary control. However, some variables maybe influence the research either Face-to-face interview is main data collection method, which spend over 6-month. By this way, the information is more accurate, the questions are open- ended and the content and schedule are more flexible. Then Kirsches model Is applied to improve the reliability and repeatability of the research.
Strauss & Corrine’s open coding and axial coding techniques are applied on data analysis. Findings Tolerance for Interim budget deviations Through the comparison of the results among four projects, we can not say Interim budget deviations decide the final results, which means one single events near the end maybe can change the result totally. Then, they require four mangers to submit a monthly status reports to explain the variation and the corrective actions, however, the documents were not effective method for tight budgetary control.
Line item control really pay much attention about these except final budget figure. Unfortunately, the line item control is almost non-existent. It is significant for us to analyze the reports on the line-by-line basis. Intensity of budget-related communication The four managers and corporate superiors do not take the budget-related communication very often and they focus on wrong field that bring negative influences to the managers. Instead, they should better discussion more about how to rectify the situations and achieve the budgets.
Face-to-face meeting to discuss budget deviations is an essential step, but they never did it. Van deer Steed’s model suggests a project manager ,his superiors and his subordinate to take part in the meeting. However, they can not fulfill, instead, they and their subordinate managers and team hold the budget-related discussion frequently and intensively. Emphasis on meeting the budget. All the four managers consider that the quality of the system , customer satisfaction and the degree of the eventually used are more crucial than meeting the budget. 0 0
Emergent factors affecting tight budgetary control Development context factors Firstly, The extent of budget tight control is influenced by the complexity of the business and development context. Then, The more time and energy to discuss the budgetary performance the organization or project cost , the manage will pay more attention on this field. So the organization culture and project culture do affect tight budgetary control. At last, different projects own different target customer and purpose so that the customer type impacted the tightness of control applied.
