Invest in Realistic and Comprehensive Project Costing

IT leaders are often held accountable for unexpected cost overruns despite routinely being excluded from project budgeting in the first place. The result? Initiatives that fail to deliver, strained relationships with finance, and an ongoing credibility gap. Our actionable research helps IT leaders get a seat at the budget table, adopt a more realistic project costing model, and clearly demonstrate IT’s value.

Inflation is pushing tech prices higher. Don’t let outdated, idealistic, and incomplete costing sink your IT investments. Embrace a data-supported but agile costing approach to build credibility and improve long-term planning.

1. Committing to exact numbers is foolish

A static budget with rigid figures doesn’t reflect shifts in tech pricing, especially in areas like cloud where costs can rise by 20 to 30% or more annually. Move to flexible, range-based costing models that account for uncertainty, inflation, and vendor volatility and revisit your costing model as you get closer to the spend date.

2. Stop overpromising and underestimating.

It’s a common scenario in many projects: the potential benefits are exaggerated while the costs and risks are underestimated. This leads to costs that are higher than expected and IT initiatives that deliver less value than anticipated.

3. Ignoring post-project costs is a costly mistake.

Don’t gloss over how much it will cost to maintain and support the outcomes of a project over the long term. Be sure to calculate your planned investment’s total cost of ownership in the early stages to avoid unpleasant surprises down the road.

Use this step-by-step blueprint to avoid costing problems from the very start.

Our complete five-step costing strategy, complemented by four Excel-based financial workbooks and tools, helps IT leaders create credible, adaptable, and defensible project and investment cost estimates. Use this research to:

Learn common project costing techniques and the pros and cons of each.
Establish IT cost categories and organize your costing data to generate reports on your project’s progress and performance.
Cost your project by documenting your working assumptions, identifying and quantifying benefits and risks, calculating workforce and vendor costs, and determining behind-the-scenes costs.
Analyze financial impacts by determining how to measure your project’s long-term success.
Leverage your costing data by communicating, tracking, reviewing, and revising it.

Invest in Realistic and Comprehensive Project Costing Research & Tools

1. Invest in Realistic and Comprehensive Project Costing Deck – This detailed, practical guide takes you through each step of crafting a modern costing model.

This blueprint provides you with the insights and processes you need to develop a costing approach that’s rooted in your organization’s current reality but pliable enough to adapt to change.

Learn about the leading techniques for project costing and set meaningful cost categories to support planning, tracking, and reporting.
Estimate your project’s costs across both best-case and worst-case scenarios to account for uncertainty.
Give yourself the data to analyze the financial performance of every technology investment and prove the value of IT.

2. Project Costing Workbook – A cost planning and tracking Excel tool to build your project’s financial foundation.

This tool supports the comprehensive quantification of project benefits, risks, and costs.

Establish workforce pay rates and hours for different skill sets and roles.
Itemize and estimate the costs of your project by each of its phases.
Document optimistic, pessimistic, most likely, and weighted cost estimates.

3. Cost-Benefit Analysis Workbook – An Excel template that assesses both tangible and intangible costs and benefits.

Broader in scope than ROI, a cost-benefit analysis provides early insights about project viability at the intake stage.

Quantify all costs and benefits according to a standard unit of measurement to aid comparison and analysis.
Analyze the costs versus the benefits of your proposed IT project.

Review the cost-benefit totals of your investment by phase, scenario, and cost type.

4. TCO Calculator – This Excel tool provides a full view of total costs over your project’s lifecycle.

Estimate the total costs of your investment for up to five years postproject.

Summarize your estimated amounts versus actual costs.
Assess the long-term cost of operating and maintaining your investment.
Document and analyze the variables and assumptions that could influence your costs.
Compare your estimated versus actual costs.

5. ROI Workbook – An Excel tool that calculates your proposed project’s estimated return on investment.

Forecast the long-term financial gains you can expect from your investment and when.

Document the tangible benefits and costs of your investment over the course of its lifecycle.
Gain the data you need to prove IT’s value.

Track the investment’s realization of tangible benefits over time and when 100% ROI could be realized.

Do the math now so that you can defend the spend later.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 5-phase advisory process. You'll receive 10 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Learn common costing techniques

Call 1: Review top-down, bottom-up, and three-point project estimation approaches.
Call 2: Discuss and organize past project documentation to aid top-down estimation.