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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