Finance Head, DoFAM, BITS Goa
Why
Three campus festivals a year, each one a small company that exists for a week. The budget decides what is possible, and every department believes its claim is the important one.
How
I owned the budget for Waves, Quark and Spree: planning it, splitting it across departments, and arbitrating between competing claims when the money ran out before the ideas did. A core team of forty to fifty people worked inside that plan across three consecutive cycles.
What came out
Three festival cycles delivered inside the plan, with the arguments about money settled before the events rather than during them.
What broke
The first cycle had allocations that were fair on paper and wrong in practice, because they were made before anyone had priced the actual vendors. The later cycles budgeted from quotes, not estimates.