Zero Base It ALL

Most governments that evaluated zero base budgeting and decided not to use it said that it would not be worth the work put into it. This begs the question of, “not worth it for whom?” The governments that actually did zero base budgeting ended up being very satisfied with the results, and this is even with many conditions that would make the opinions of officials skew against it. Zero base budgeting is the process of an organization setting priorities and then breaking all the services that they offer or would like to offer into packages, and then making decisions on which of those to keep based on how well they fit into the organizational goals. This is usually not fully done by someone at the center of an organization, but the packages are made and ranked by managers by the level of their importance to their function. Zero base budgeting provides a powerful alternative to typical budget cutting strategies because it recognizes that cutting costs is only helpful if you are cutting the right costs. It doesn’t mandate any across-the-board percentage level reductions, like other sorts of budgeting demand. Zero base budgeting is not very popular with governments, but it helps them more effectively know what to keep and get rid of while developing a deeper understanding of how the services they offer connect to their long-term objectives.

The first step of zero base budgeting is the most difficult and necessary of all. The critical analysis of what an organization’s objectives are and what level and quality of service they should offer is extremely important to cutting through mental laziness and a bias to waste. Public servants are never satisfied as some of them feel they owe an unrealistic level of service to the citizens, and others ask what level of service they can get away with. Having to reevaluate responsibilities rather than continue to do what always has been done is an extremely effective way to find stupid waste no one recognizes. Governments from local to Federal, seem to have a deep lack of understanding about what their role is. People fundamentally disagree about the question of role, but common ground must be found when it comes to the applied decisions of everyday governmental maintenance. This shared platform allows organizational buy-in a way that traditional budgeting does not. People are able to understand how everything that they do ties into the greater strategy of the government.…