By Simon Islam (Entrepreneur & Sr. ITPM)

With the economy and IT departments both shrinking with budget crisis, many Managers are sweating to find the ultimate sweet spot - keeping business happy, and getting things done - welcome to the club of budget jugglers (Members Only).

In my regular interaction with IT Managers from various large companies, the common pain that most share is budget pain, "We have $48,000 budget to convert an entire legacy billing system to web based. Can you do it?". Hmm, now thats a small budget for all that complex and tiresome job. How can we solve this equation where x + y + .. z = 1 year of hard work + complete satisfaction.

Lets do the math now, first and foremost is to go through the scope if they have one done, the architectural changes required, and then evaluating the business and data layers, listing out the various calculations, business logic and rules. The scope document is the biggest hurdle. If a company has it then its great, but if they don't then it will take around 2 months with a Business Analyst and Sr. Dev to get the scoping done, but that too depends on how cooperative the stake holders are and if we have all the information at hand. Never an easy task to finalize and sign off on the scope.