The Budget That Lived a Double Life (Vol. 1, Issue 6)
- D.B Trench
- Dec 29, 2025
- 3 min read
Excerpt:
This week’s Dispatch explores the moment every PM faces someday: the realization that the budget you’ve been managing… is not the same one leadership believes they approved.
Full Issue:
There’s a rumor in Deliveria that every project has two budgets:
The budget leadership thinks exists.
The budget that exists in reality.
This week’s Dispatch is about the time I discovered mine were not even remotely the same species.
A Tale from the Trench
It started on a Tuesday, the most dangerous day of the week — far enough from Monday that people have energy, but close enough to Friday that they feel entitled to make decisions.
I got an email from Finance:
“Quick validation needed. The budget variance looks off.”
“Quick” and “budget” should never appear in the same sentence.
That’s like saying “brief existential crisis.”
I opened the spreadsheet. The numbers stared back at me with the kind of smug confidence you only see in villains who know you can’t prove anything.
Everything looked… fine.
Too fine.
Budgets are never fine.
I checked the tabs. Cross-checked assumptions. Re-reviewed accruals. Consulted the sacred pivot tables.
Then I noticed it: A single line item quietly pretending not to exist.
“Unallocated Contingency – $0.”
Zero? Zero?! I swear I heard the Budget Goblin snickering somewhere in the shadows.
This contingency had been $40,000 a month ago. Now it was gone like a snack someone swore they didn’t touch.
That was the moment I realized: Someone had repurposed my contingency without telling me.
Financial Madness Isn’t Malicious — It’s Mathematical Chaos
No one steals money in Deliveria.
They just:
“move it”
“reallocate it”
“temporarily shift it to cover a shortfall”
“borrow from next quarter”
“pull ahead a cost”
“correct a misalignment”
or my personal favorite:“true it up later”(which is Finance for “never speak of this again”)
Budget madness rarely feels like drama. It feels like subtle erosion — tiny nibbles until the numbers no longer resemble the world you’re managing.
Survival Lesson #6: Every Number Has a Story
Whenever you see a variance, ask these three questions:
“Is this a real variance or a timing variance?”
Because nothing says “surprise panic” like Finance telling you a cost hit this month…that hasn’t happened yet.
“Has someone upstream made an assumption on my behalf?”
Nine times out of ten, yes.
“Is this a correction, or a correction of a correction?”
This is where the real madness lives.Budgets have genealogy charts. No one keeps them.
The PMTales Field Insight
Here’s an uncomfortable truth:
You are judged on numbers you didn’t generate, interpreted through processes you didn’t design, reviewed by people who weren’t in the room, based on assumptions no one documented.
That’s not incompetence. That’s the nature of financial ecosystems.
Your job isn’t to control everything. Your job is to translate chaos into clarity long enough to make decisions.
The Contingency That Never Was
By the end of the day, I had solved the mystery:
My contingency had been “borrowed” to cover an “urgent need” in another project’s “temporary shortfall” that someone “was going to tell me about.”
Everyone involved said this with absolute sincerity.
No villainy.
Just Budget Goblins doing what Budget Goblins do.
I rebuilt the spreadsheet. Reframed the narrative. Presented the numbers with the calm of someone who has accepted that math is an interpretive art in project environments.
Leadership nodded. Finance nodded. Everyone agreed we “had visibility now.”
I nodded too.
We all lied together. That’s how budgeting works.
From the PMTales Armory
If budget madness is stalking your project, try your Artifacts from the Armory.
Budget & Estimates Creature Cards - Perfect for making financial conversations diplomatic instead of accusatory.
Field Note of the Week
The numbers don’t tell the truth. They tell a story.
And part of being a PM in Deliveria is learning to read the story behind the spreadsheet — the motives, the pressures, the corrections, the unspoken negotiations.
Once you understand that, budget madness feels… manageable.
Almost.
Until Next Week
May your variances be explainable, your contingencies untouched, and your month-end reconciliations merciful.
See you in the trench,
D.B. Trench
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