Today I had a difficult meeting. This meeting was between Me, Melita and Peter, to plan out the costs for the project so that we could define how much we think the project will cost and how much we need to ask for from funders.
To give you some background, I have steered well clear of maths since GCSE, and blissfully forgotten everything I knew up until then. I've never shown an ounce of interest in finance or accounting, my money management is not to be held up as an exemplar. Budgets are not something that turn my cogs.
Peter had asked me to plan an agenda for this meeting so that we could get the ball rolling and start meating out our plans for the project, the problem with this was that I didn't have the tiniest clue as to how to start planning a budget for a project - up until 6 or 7 months ago I was considering being a volunteer on a project that spends the money, not the employee who's in charge of raising the money!
Fortunately for me, Melita seems to enjoy this sort of planning (which I will never understand), and had prepared not one, but three, mindmaps that presented the myriad of things on which to spend money (the vast majority of which I could never have even thought of before today's meeting).
This complete ignorance was also not helpful during the meeting - Peter and Melita, who have both had involvement in project budgets before, were spouting finance jargon which was alien to me (I wouldn't know an FCR if it shouted at me), so I sat tight until there was enough room to ask what everything meant. This is not the best way to act in a meeting.
The silver-lining is that I now have some very pretty mindmaps that tell me what goes in a budget for next time, and a bit of a footing on some of the terms that I can learn about, so that I don't look entirely stupid in the next budget meeting, hooray! Melita also suggested I aquaint myself with businessballs.com, which is proving a highly useful ornament to my rollercoaster of a learning curve!
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