7.4 Control Costs

Track actual spending against the budget and act on the gap.

Monitoring and Controlling / Cost · ← PMBOK reference · See it on the map

Why it matters

A project that only discovers it is over budget at the very end has no time left to correct course; catching the gap early is what makes a fix possible.

What done looks like

Actual spend is compared to the baseline regularly and any variance has a response.

First time tip

Update actual spend as often as you update the schedule, not less often. A cost report that lags the schedule hides overruns until they are already large.

What you need (Inputs)

• Project Management Plan
• Project Funding Requirements
• Work Performance Data
• Organizational Process Assets

How you do it (Tools & Techniques)

• Expert Judgment
• Data Analysis
• Earned Value Analysis
• To-Complete Performance Index
• Reserve Analysis
• Project Management Information System

What you get (Outputs)

• Work Performance Information
  How Scrum/Kanban projects satisfy this — counted from: sprints under way (driftless/models/delivery.py:Sprint) for an agile project, or service levels and incidents (driftless/models/operations.py) for an operations-cadence one — a sprint under way is the work performance data an agile team reads instead of a baseline-and-actuals pair; an operations-cadence project reads the same question off its service levels and the incidents raised against them
• Cost Forecasts
• Change Requests

Worked example

Six weeks in, $19,000 is spent against the $14,000 planned by that point, because the wall repair ran deeper than the quote assumed. It surfaces at the Friday review while reserve can still cover it, rather than at handover.

Common pitfalls

• Comparing spend to the whole budget instead of to what was planned by now.
• Updating actual spend less often than the schedule, so overruns surface late.
• Treating a draw on reserve as free because the total still fits.

How driftless helps

• Earned Value Analysis can be run here.
• To-Complete Performance Index can be run here.
• Reserve Analysis can be run here.