Module 5: Financial, Resource and Risk Management

2.1 Reviewing your project budget needs and priorities

There are a number of key questions to ask when designing your research project:

• What do you want to achieve? What is the focus of your research and what are the expectations of key stakeholders such as the granting body, your university, and your research team? You will be promising to deliver certain things and will need to ensure they can be achieved. It is therefore important to make sure you have sufficient resources to accomplish your goals.
• What have you done in the past and what would you do differently if you could? What have you learned from the past that would inform superior performance on this project?  Think about where costs have been poorly managed in the past. Can you do better this time around?
• What must you do well to succeed with this project? You need to identify the key success factors for the project. This can be a complex question in a research project where the outcomes are usually not known at the start of the project and where the directions of the project may change based on research progress and findings.  It will be particularly important in considering where your limited funding priorities will be allocated.
• What can you do? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your resources and capabilities?  Often you will have access to fewer resources than you would like. How can you optimise your efforts to achieve the most possible? What is beyond your capacity? Be realistic.
• What can you do? What opportunities might arise and what threats could emerge in a rapidly changing environment?  Keep in mind that there may be some avenues you could access to draw on additional resources or other funding avenues. These can assist in supplementing your project.

If you follow Module 1’s project planning process, you will be in a good position to estimate your budget requirements. The research objectives will be clearly spelt out, and your estimates will neatly follow through. If you have submitted a loose plan, you are well advised to sit down and very carefully think through the detailed costs that have to be covered.  You might find that your estimates are well below what they should be.

Obviously, the financial objective of most research projects is not to make a profit. (In fact, having money left at the end of a project can make things very complicated!) Realistically, the objective will be to complete high quality research within the budget and timeframe specified in the grant deed, agreement, or contract.  However, you should not underestimate the real costs of doing research.