Project Cost Management

Explore cost management by establishing a cost baseline, budgeting with sponsorship, and tracing progressive elaboration from ballpark and preliminary estimates to definitive cost estimates, to avoid overruns.

Explore major cost types in project cost management, including capital cost, cost of capital, direct and indirect costs, administration expenses, and key concepts like opportunity cost and return on investment.

Learn to plan cost management, estimate costs, determine the budget, and control costs by comparing against the cost baseline, using historical data and progressive elaboration.

Plan cost management using the project charter to define scope and funding, and apply payback, return on investment, internal rate of return, and net present value for budgeting and reporting.

Explore expert judgment, bottom-up, three-point estimation, analogous, and parametric estimation to estimate project costs using the project scope, project charter, and historical data for ballpark figures.

Learn the cost of quality (CoC) as the total effort to prevent and appraise quality, plus internal and external failure costs, to improve good quality and reduce non-conformance.

Learn how to determine the budget by aggregating bottom-up activity cost estimates into a cost baseline. Add a management reserve to cover unknowns and form the cost budget.

Understand the cost baseline or S-curve as a time-phased cost curve that measures, monitors, and controls project cost across phases, signaling overruns or on-time progress, and introducing PMB and EVM.

Aggregate costs from activities to work packages and control accounts, and apply funding limit reconciliation with contingency reserve for known unknowns and management reserve for unknown unknowns.

Controlling costs tracks variances against the cost baseline and the s-curve using variance analysis and performance reporting. Update budget forecasts and document change requests with their cost and schedule impact.

Learn earned value management (EVM) to control costs by comparing plan value, actual cost, and earned value against work performed and scheduled.

Explore earned value management through schedule and cost variances, learning how SV and CV reveal ahead or behind schedule and under or over budget.

Learn how earned value management uses SPI and CPI to assess schedule and cost efficiency, with EV, PV, AC, and EAC calculations guiding variance at completion.

Conclude project cost management course by applying four stages of cost management with metrics, tools, and techniques aligned to PMP to keep projects on schedule, on cost, and in quality.