Once you've licensed FullCost, the ultimate cost-modeling tool, we'll guide your team through the process of gathering the needed data and quickly setting up a new cost model that produces your rates.

This leaves you with a solid, transparent budget, rates, and cost model, and self-sufficiency to refresh your budget and rates each year.

"We couldn't have finished the process in a compressed time without Dean's tough facilitation, clear expertise, and arm's length objectivity."

Matt Frymire CIO, Riverside County, CA

If you engage your leadership team in a planning process, the results go far beyond just the financial benefits. Managers learn to think like entrepreneurs; they become accountable for their lines of business, including for competitive rates; and teamwork is enhanced through internal support agreements.

We'll facilitate your leadership team through a step-by-step process where they define their services catalogs, forecast demand, and plan their costs. In this process, we provide all necessary training, clearly defined "homework" assignment, and group coaching workshops.

Benefits

• Your project team learns the concepts, data flows, and the software, enabling them to set up your model and repeat the process in future years.

• We configure the model and the software with you.

• We help you set up a partial model, with a clear understanding of how to finish it.

• We generate examples and patterns you can use to complete the model.

• Your project team learns the meaning of the data, and can better explain results.

• There's less risks of mistakes (wasting time on dead ends).

• Just-in-time training for your project team results in a deeper understanding and better retention.

• Your executive and project team spend less time and effort studying and leading the process.

• We review much of the data, producing a higher quality (more defensible) result.

• We contribute to your existing data, stimulating new thinking (e.g., developing a service catalog beyond what you have already).

• We identify areas where your data is missing or needs improvement in the future.

• Our working alongside your project team reduces the risk of project delays.

• Your executive and project team spend less time and effort combing the data for errors.

• Involvement builds ownership of the plan among all leader, the basis for holding them accountable for its delivery.

• The result is much higher quality, based on leaders' in-depth knowledge of their respective businesses.

• Our interaction with your leadership team at every step stretches thinking, and allows us to train your leaders in best practices (e.g., a detailed, leading-edge service catalog; internal teamwork accountabilities; how to handle special situations).

• The model includes speculative deliverables -- new ideas emerging from your leadership team that may be worth funding.

• Leaders learn clear definitions of their respective businesses within the business, including the Structural Cybernetics framework of business domains and insights on your organizational structure.

• Leaders learn to focus on results (not just tasks and processes), through their involvement in defining their respective catalogs and deliverables.

• Leaders learn a culture of customer focus, and clearly define their customers (both clients outside the department and peers within the department).

• Leaders learn a culture of entrepreneurship, including appropriate use of vendors (outsourcing) and opportunities to grow their businesses through innovation.

• Teamwork is clearly defined in internal prime/sub-contractor accountabilities, and in internal customer-supplier relationships for support services.

• The experience installs a repeatable business and budget planning process.

Cost

Elapsed time: 11 months; or 15 months to tune the model to this year's reality and then "flip" it into your actual budget submission for next year

Of course, once the model is set up, subsequent years become easy. Some deliverables are deleted, some added, and cost estimates are revised. In future years, the FullCost process may actually take less time than traditional budget processes.

Consulting days: 44

Approximate cost: $260,000 - $325,000 (plus license, materials, travel)

(You can reduce this by facilitating selected workshops yourself, and through the judicious use of webinars.)

Level of effort: Project teams typically spend half time throughout the process, and full time in the last month of preparation and during the negotiation process. Leaders typically spend a day or two per week working on FullCost.

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