How to avoid Rusher's Gap

We're talking about a potential budget disaster that iscalled "Rusher's Gap." Here's how it works. Let's say you're building a swimming pool. It's easier to talk about a swimming pool, but this happens for every IT project. You say, I'm going to build a pool. You call someone out, he gives you an estimate, very detailed, comes in, $65,000 and you say to yourself, "You know what? It never comes in on budget." I'm going to in my head in finance and go to the bank, I'm going to make sure that I have enough money for $90,000 because I'm going build it a $25,000 extra cushion because I know it's going to cost more than this. Rusher's Gap is the difference between what you budgeted, this extra overflow, what the contactor says and what the actual cost of the project is, which might come in at a $110,000. And the point that Bill Rusher was trying to get across was not only are things more expensive than your contractor tells you they are, they are more expensive than you could even possibly imagine when you sit there at the beginning of the budget.

The point is when you have a large IT project, you're going to have an estimate from the contractor, you're going to come in behind that estimate, you're going to try to tear it apart. You're going to look and see where could it go north of that? What are the problems that you could run into, and you're going to build in this fudge factor. But if you don't do a good job here and you end up in this area, all you can do is start throwing features over the side or pushing out the implementation so it takes longer so that you can get more money in an extra budget period.

So the lesson is, when you're building this taking an extra step because otherwise you're going to end up in Rusher's Gap and you're going to end up with a project that's not giving you all that you want when you need it.