Does your project have an actual funded budget? Often that simple question has a complicated answer. With many projects the answer is "no". This usually means that people may have been allocated to doing a task in their "spare" time, but management will not allocate any specific time or material resources to getting the project completed.

Sometimes, projects are nothing more than a creation from "management babble" (a legitimate term). Usually this occurs when lower management takes something upper management said as a "go ahead" when it really was speculation about possibilities.

The best method of eliminating waste like this is to present upper management with a project charter (complete with budgetary estimates). This signoff will insure that upper management knows about and approves of what you are doing. It also means that you will have their backing for people, time and money.

With a Business Continuity and/or Disaster Recovery project, this buy-in is a critical success factor. This way, if something goes wrong, no one can claim they didn't know and blame everything on you.

That would NEVER happen. Right?

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