[rup] RUP and Budget Allocations

In IBM's RUP forum the following question was asked. I recommend joining that forum. Just send an email to majordomo@lists.us.ibm.com and put "subscribe rup" to join, and you will have access to a whole lot of experts (real and self proclaimed) as well as other practitioners just trying to succeed. For all posts from a forum I will use [listname] in the title to show what forum it came from as I did above.

To get a list of the other great forums to join check out this link:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/dw_rforums.jsp
As of this post I am on rup, bizmod, otug, ruc, reqpro, lifecycle, uml. The link above can tell you what those are about and what others are available.

Ok so the gist of the post was this (I edited it a touch):
In my company, the budget for a project is allocated at the very start of the project but more importantly, the budget is allocated only one time!

So my question is, when it comes to contract and budget allocation, what are the impacts of a RUP adoption on these practices ?

My answer is this:
Adopting RUP often impacts the financial models of the company adopting it. This usually surprises people, but it is true. Most successful RUP Adoptions are successful _because_ of this impact, but only when the business buys into the change.

Specifically, the idea of "estimating once" changes, as well as the decision of which project expenses are "capitalizable" vs. "expensed." In a traditional waterfall project management model, early phases, such as planning, are typically not considered capitalizable. This causes them to think Inception isn't either, yet much of the work done in Inception IS capitalizable. Many people struggle with this and make the mistake of saying Inception (and worse Elaboration!) are not capitalizable on projects.

So be wary of how RUP impacts budget allocation practices as well as other financial considerations when adopting it.

The next few posts contain some more ideas on this topic.