Project Cost Control

You are the project manager nearing the end of a relatively large, complicated, and long term project. You are reasonably satisfied with the result—to the best of your knowledge, the project is achieving what it was intended to do, within planned schedule and cost goals. You have diligently kept track of your requisitions, and your project cost spreadsheet is updated and current. However, at this point, you receive a call from the Accounting group saying that you are radically over budget. The Accountant is in a state of panic, thinking that some of the blame will fall his or her way. The invoices are piling up, and the targeted cost is already a distant memory. The only approach available to you now is to dig through all of the invoices and determine what happened. This proves to be a difficult undertaking, the invoices may not always be tied to a purchase order, or there may be multiple invoices against a single purchase order. You will see charges that you do not recognize, which you must chase down. You may even see charges coming from within the organization, including some that involve labor charges associated with startup. Now you have weeks of work ahead of you, and the project is in startup. Time is something that you do not have.

In all probability, you are working in a “non-projecticized” environment. In this type of environment, the …