314 Managing Budgets and Resources

Unit Overview

314 Managing Budgets and Resources is a unit within the CMI level 3 module that prepares the leaders for their respective roles within the organisations. The organisation work with tight resources and budgets which involve being able to utilise the resources effectively to achieve the desired goals. Leaders have a responsibility to ensure they identify the resources, financial, material and human resources that they require to achieve set goals and objectives within their team. This involves following the organisational policies that have been established to guide the activities of individuals. By understanding the budgeting and resourcing principle.

The leaders should be able to achieve the desired levels of performance with limited resources. This requires them to understand approaches of budget and stock control which involve being able to monitor the utilisation of the resources assigned to the team and evaluating them against the accomplishment of the set goals and tasks. The leaders must play a central role to facilitate sustainable and efficient utilisation of resources minimising wastages to ensure the team is able to achieve its goals and objectives.

314 Managing Budgets and Resources is a unit that is designed with the focus on improving the ability of the leaders to budget effectively and manage resources. It presents the learners with training on the principles that they can use to control the utilisation of resources. Leaders are also guided to develop effective strategies and measures of monitoring the management of resources during the actual completion of tasks and responsibilities within the workplace. By pursuing this unit, the learners are guided to develop leadership skills that influence the use of resources to achieve duties and goals within the workplace. The unit is taught in 25 hours of guided learning and contributes 5 credit values towards the completion of the CMI Level 3 module.

Suitability of the Unit

314 Managing Budgets and Resources is a unit that is designed to help stakeholders to develop and monitor the performance of the various budgets that have been prepared within the workplace. The unit is suitable to stakeholders who are made responsible for ensuring that organisational resources are effectively utilised to achieve assigned duties and goals. As such, 314 Managing Budgets and Resources is a unit that is suitable to all stakeholders within the organisation. This ranges from the team leaders to the senior managers within the workplace. It helps stakeholders understand the principles of preparing and managing budgets to achieve the organisational goals and objectives.

The unit is designed to meet the learning needs of the first-line managers and supervisors within the workplace. These stakeholders are involved in overseeing one or more project teams to ensure that they achieve the assigned goals and objectives. With this unit, the leaders are provided with the necessary training for implementing organisational and legal requirements in the process of developing, managing and implementing budgets and resource utilisation plans. The unit is also applicable to the senior managers and other leaders within the workplace who are required to play critical roles involving allocating resources and facilitating accomplishment of the organisational goals and objectives. Employees and team members can also benefit from the unit as it equips them with principles of utilising resources and prepares them for leadership roles in the workplace.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learner should be able to:

• Understand the different types of resources that are managed within the organisation and their areas of responsibility

• Show knowledge of the significance of managing resources effectively within their areas of responsibility

• Understand the purpose and types of budgets that are used within the organisation

• Show understanding of the need for keeping an effective budget and adhering to the budget

• Explain the organisational governance and policies that dictate the management of budgets

• Understand the different types of costs and sources of information that support understanding costs within the budget

• Understand approaches implemented in managing costs and ensuring that they do not create significant variances in the budgeting process in their areas of authority

• Explain the different methods of monitoring budgets

• Outline actions that can be used to take control of a budget

• Understand mechanisms to address the problems associated with the budgeting process

Key Learning Areas

This is a unit that builds the ability of the leader to effectively handle the development of budgets and implement them to ensure that the leaders are able to achieve the desired goals and objectives. Some of the main areas covered within the unit include:

Managing Resources

This area of learning is critical in improving the ability of the leaders to effectively use the resources for the purpose of meeting assigned duties and objectives. This area of learning is important in shaping the understanding of different resources within the workplace and methods that can be used to optimise the utilisation of the resources to achieve assigned duties and tasks.

Managing Budgets

This area of learning focuses on handling the critical aspects of developing a budget and implementing it within their teams. The area of learning is essential in helping the learner to understand different types of budgets within the workplace and approaches that they can use to ensure that they use these budgets to promote the performance in the desired roles and objectives. The leaders are also guided to understand approaches that they can use to achieve the desired levels of performance in terms of effectively evaluating the performance of the budgets.

Monitoring Budgets

This area of learning helps the learners to understand critical principles that they should use to ensure that the budgets contribute towards meeting the desired goals and objectives. This area of learning provides the learners with the training of understanding budget and stock control within the workplace. They are guided to understand methods of diagnosing and addressing variances within the budgets to ensure that they achieve the desired goals and objectives in managing the resources.

Evaluation

In this area of learning, the evaluation contributes to improving the ability of the learners to acquire the necessary information and skills. This evaluation process ensures that the assessors and the learner understand the principles and practical content that have been learned within the unit. The written assessment is used as the main tool to evaluate the performance of learners in line with the theoretical and practical content taught within the unit.