Rethinking Budgeting Forum

A key tenet of GFOA's Rethinking Budgeting initiative is to encourage government budget professionals to think of themselves as chefs rather than as cooks. No two governments or communities are exactly the same, so what works for one may not work for yours. Rather than follow a specific checklist or recipe for success, GFOA encourages you to harness your inner chef and create your own recipe. At our annual conference, GFOA featured a panel discussion with leaders who have embraced the role of chef and are experimenting with new budget ingredients and techniques to satisfy their stakeholders. We got lots of questions from the audience in this session and wanted to pose these to the broader GFOA community. Let us know your thoughts!

Can you give one concrete example where your budget office implemented a significant change to the process, something that disrupted the status quo, and explain what pushback you got and how you dealt with it?

A key tenet of GFOA's Rethinking Budgeting initiative is to encourage government budget professionals to think of themselves as chefs rather than as cooks. No two governments or communities are exactly the same, so what works for one may not work for yours. Rather than follow a specific checklist or recipe for success, GFOA encourages you to harness your inner chef and create your own recipe. At our annual conference, GFOA featured a panel discussion with leaders who have embraced the role of chef and are experimenting with new budget ingredients and techniques to satisfy their stakeholders. We got lots of questions from the audience in this session and wanted to pose these to the broader GFOA community. Let us know your thoughts!

Can you give one concrete example where your budget office implemented a significant change to the process, something that disrupted the status quo, and explain what pushback you got and how you dealt with it?

This budget season, I am focusing in on decision architecture and creating trust in the process. We implemented a big shift in the budget calendar this year: previously, all department budget requests - regardless of size or complexity - were due on the same day. This created a lack of accountability for departments that missed the deadline and didn't turn in their budgets for weeks, resulted in sloppy and rushed work, and led to bad feelings from the departments that were on time as our office struggled to provide adequate attention to each of their budgets in a timely manner. 

Recognizing this issue, we are implementing a rolling submission system, with a different set of departments due each week through September and October. This acknowledges the seasonality of the work of different departments (ex. finance, administration, select board office are all very busy in the fall, so an earlier submission deadline is better, whereas recreation, public works, and public facilities have had very busy summers and take a lot of vacation in September, so a later deadline gives them time to reorient). We gave everyone a heads up back in July, so they had a month and a half to prepare for this change. My goal was to give everyone enough time to think about their budgets in a meaningful way, gather adequate information (such as going out for quotes from vendors, reviewing actuals, and talking to staff), and give me time to process budget information without getting burned out. 

Most importantly, the new system means that I am limiting the amount of information coming into my office at any time, giving me the opportunity to absorb the requests and dig into the analysis, ask important questions, and identify how the request ties into our broader goals both as an organization and as a community. This makes it easier for the town manager (who does not have the luxury of time to do deep analysis) to understand the rationale of different departments' requests and look at the budget as a big picture later in the season. For me, this change gives me the chance to create trust through warmth and competence by developing an opportunity to ask questions about budget requests, have a well-defined process, and make people feel heard and respected (a.k.a. I could actually respond to their emails in a timely manner, rather than sitting on them for weeks as I waded through requests).    

There were a lot of questions about fairness of a rolling deadline, but after explaining how it would allow our office to better serve each department and give them more individualized attention, a lot of people understood why we wanted to implement the change. Once we got over the annual grumblings about unrealistic deadlines, most of the departments have fallen in line with the new schedule and seem either a) happy to have their budgets done and discussed, or b) happy to have a few extra weeks. Still many departments to go but I hope to have a favorable report at the end of the season! 

A key tenet of GFOA's Rethinking Budgeting initiative is to encourage government budget professionals to think of themselves as chefs rather than as cooks. No two governments or communities are exactly the same, so what works for one may not work for yours. Rather than follow a specific checklist or recipe for success, GFOA encourages you to harness your inner chef and create your own recipe. At our annual conference, GFOA featured a panel discussion with leaders who have embraced the role of chef and are experimenting with new budget ingredients and techniques to satisfy their stakeholders. We got lots of questions from the audience in this session and wanted to pose these to the broader GFOA community. Let us know your thoughts!

Can you give one concrete example where your budget office implemented a significant change to the process, something that disrupted the status quo, and explain what pushback you got and how you dealt with it?