Project Cost Accounting

Overview/Description
 Consider the scenario: your company sponsors your project and delays another project due to your cost estimate and available funding. If you padded your budget too much, you may complete the project with enough money left to have done both projects. While you saved your company some money, what impact will it have on the company to not complete the other project in this time frame? By overestimating your project cost too much, you may impact other projects your company is not able to sponsor. Cost management is the process required to ensure that the project is completed within the specified project budget. To manage cost, you must understand cost sources, techniques to estimate project cost, how to track not only cost of the project but cost of each "piece" of the project. While it is always preferable to end the project under budget, you want to make sure that you are close to the estimated budget. In this course, you will learn to estimate and evaluate cost using several techniques including work, cost, and organization breakdown structures.

Target Audience
 Anyone working on a project team, including directors, supervisors, managers, project managers and team leaders.

Expected Duration
1.5 hours

Lesson Objectives:

Cost Sources

  • recognize the value in identifying cost sources.
  • choose the factors that can affect labor and equipment costs.
  • identify costs that may be overlooked when planning a project.
  • link estimation techniques to the factors they measure (time or quality).
  • identify the reasons for having a contingency.

    • Estimating Cost

  • recognize the value of estimating project costs.
  • identify why estimating cost is important.
  • match each cost estimating method with its description.
  • specify why cost breakdown is necessary.

    • Controlling Project Cost

  • recognize the benefit of using cost control methods.
  • match the tracking and reporting methods.
  • identify the appropriate earned value measurements given specific situations.
  • specify the reasons for tracking commitments.

    • Course Number: PROJ0214