Congratulations – you are an IT manager and you've been given a budget to work with. Oh, oh, now what? Oh, and if you're going to want any money next year, you had better learn how to ask for more money.

This budget stuff can be tricky. The fact that we talk about budgets using a vocabulary that most IT managers probably don't have (or at least don't use every day) makes it just a bit harder. If you're going to do this correctly, we're going to need to have a talk about what's important and what the process for creating a valid budget is.

The good news is that all of this budget stuff is not all that hard to do. It really comes down to learning how your particular company wants to talk about money. If you can discover the vocabulary and the types of budgets that they like to use, then you'll be half-way there. In this book we're going to cover everything that you need to know about your IT budget. We'll talk about how to use the budget that you've been given, the different types of budgets that exists (and why), and how you can go about requesting more money.

One way to think about your IT budget is as fuel in the tank of your IT team. The more that you have, the farther you can go. Read on and find out how to fill your tank up...!