A Comprehensive Guide to Project Management Schedule and Cost Control

Book excerpt: This is the most complete guide to all the principles and techniques you need to successfully schedule projects and control their costs. Not a broad project management guide, it offers focused coverage of every essential aspect of scheduling and cost control -- including key issues ignored by typical PM guides. Expert project manager and long-time instructor Randal Wilson makes scheduling and cost control intuitive through the extensive use of graphs, charts, and case studies, and provides all the formulas and worked examples you need to succeed. Writing for both newcomers and working project managers, Wilson covers all this, and more: Project structures, including differences between projects and programs, and how those differences affect costing and scheduling Initiation: how projects start, how to develop project charters and stakeholder registers, and how to manage stakeholders Planning, in depth: what costs must be addressed, and what schedule constraints must be considered Project schedule analysis: activity definition, WBS, and work packages; activity sequencing and diagramming; proven methodologies for estimating resources and activity durations; and schedule development Project cost analysis: gathering and estimating all project costs, including labor, materials, vendor bids, subcontractors, contracts, equipment, facilities, and direct/indirect costs. Budgeting via top-down, bottom-up, and activity-based methods Project monitoring and control: earned value, tracking Gantt, S-Curves, performance reviews, milestone analysis, change control systems, estimate at completion, forecasting, and much more.