The operating budget was never included in the project. What now?
Unfunded ongoing service costIdentify recurring costs such as hosting, licenses, support, monitoring, backups, and planned maintenance. Ask the sponsor and service owner to approve a sustainable operating model or adjust the service scope. A funded implementation does not guarantee a funded service.
What to do now
- Inventory recurring operating obligations
- Estimate costs using actual service assumptions
- Assign budget ownership and funding decisions
- Align launch scope with the approved operating model
When to escalate
The service cannot be sustained after project funding ends.
The service owner and authorized operational decision maker
Example
A project identifies annual support and hosting commitments before transferring the service.
Mistake to avoid
Hiding recurring costs inside a one-time implementation estimate.
Prevent a repeat
Test whether receiving teams can operate and recover the service without depending on informal project-team support.
Suggested ApprovedFlow setup
- Tasks
- Documents
- Approvals
Keep handover tasks, operating evidence and the acceptance decision linked to the project while retaining monitoring and incident control in the actual service tools. See the platform
Related cases
- Who owns releases after the project developers leave?Missing ongoing release ownership
- No one will accept the service owner role. What should I escalate?Unassigned operational accountability
- We forgot nonfunctional requirements. What should we check now?Missing service-quality requirements
- A sponsor approves scope but not the extra budget. What should we do?Unfunded change approval