Research Project
Each student will research the budget planning and appropriation process at a two-year public institution. This will include interviews of key personnel as well as a review of the planning and process documents utilized. Particular attention should be paid to the connection between institutional planning and budgeting.
The research project constitutes 15% of the final course grade and the presentation constitutes 10%. When writing up your project, please follow the format below:
Research Project Outline
This section should contain a background narrative of the institution studied.This should include the institution's location, number of employees, number of students, program and services, budget, etc.
This section should outline the questions used to interview the CFO and individual Budget Manager/Director.
This section should describe those interviewed for the assignment.Plan to spend an hour doing each interview.
This section should detail what you discovered including the process used to develop the budget (including operational and capital budgets), connection to strategic planning, process used for ongoing monitoring of budget expenditures (including approval process), etc.
Overall reaction
Compare/contrast to Goldstein/ class discussions
As the leader - what practices would you keep?What practices would you change? Why?
Guidelines
Total pages should be 8-10…typed and double-spaced, of course (Microsoft Word document preferred)
In-class presentation will be 10 minutes MAX.
Budget manager/director cannot be yourself or your direct supervisor
If more than one person studies a school - the CFO will be the same (yes, you can conduct the interview together); however, the budget director/manager must be different.
Sample Interview questions/Topics
- Is a specific approach used to develop the budget? (see appendix A in the Goldstein book)
- What is the role/expectations of budget managers during the development process? Describe.
- What is the level or degree of involvement of stakeholders? How is that facilitated?
- Has the inclusion (or exclusion) or stakeholders influenced the campus climate?If so, how?
- Is there a correlation between development and strategic planning?
- Is the prior year closeout analyzed/utilized for following year budget development decisions?How?
- Timeline for budget development?
- How is the capital budget developed?
- Is there a contingency fund?How is that determined?
- What is the final approval process - local level?State level?
- What are the checks and balances to monitor expenditures
- Is there a "cushion" built into individual budgets?
- Have there ever been significant budget cuts, if so, what process was used to determine what to cut and by how much?
Please feel free to add to the above interview questions.
