Making sense of project cost reports
| Argh, cost reports have landed in my inbox and now I have to look at them… Do you feel like that? Project accountants are sending out end of month financial reports for us to reconcile or review and somehow cost reports feel harder than schedules. So let’s whisper it: if you receive financial reports you don’t fully understand, you are not alone!  The numbers might look familiar, but the relationships between them are not always clear. This can make financial conversations uncomfortable and reactive – not a good look when you’re sharing the budget position in Steering. Definitions project managers should be confident usingWe should be able to confidently understand and use these terms, as project managers: Actuals Actuals are what has already been spent and recorded. This includes money that has been spent outside the organisation e.g. to suppliers, and any internal costs you have to take like resource costs for colleagues working on the project. Forecast Forecasts are estimates of what the project is expected to cost in total, or in your organisation it might mean what is left to spend. In a view of a year, you’ll have actuals for the months that have closed and forecasts for predicted spend in the months to come. Commitments Commitments sit in between: money that has been contractually committed but not yet spent. These are normally reflected in purchase orders or statements of work, where you’ve told the vendor it’s OK to go ahead but they haven’t invoiced yet, or maybe even done the work yet. However, you can’t look at these figures are viewed in isolation. A common misunderstanding is assuming that unspent money is still available – it’s not because some of that will already be committed to suppliers (through POs or SOWs) or in internal resource costs (for example, if you have fixed term contractors on the job). In reality, committed costs may already consume much of the remaining budget – yikes. That doesn’t give you much to play with if you need to move things around. Another issue is focusing only on current-period actuals, rather than cumulative spend and future obligations. The current month might be looking great, but if all the other months are overspent, that’s not a good big picture. Financial fluency is a core skill for project managers, but I find that we don’t get taught it. The trouble is, you can understand it in theory and read the relevant sections of the PMBOK® Guide, but in practice, your own country-specific accounting rules and organisation-specific processes mean that it’s a bit different wherever you work. You can start building confidence with cost reports starts with asking basic questions. What is included in actuals this month? What commitments are expected to convert into spend next month? What assumptions underpin the forecast? And are these still what we believe? Financial fluency doesn’t require accounting expertise (thank goodness). You can get there with curiosity, a willingness to ask questions, and regular engagement with the numbers. Book a monthly chat with your project finance person. The more comfortable you get with what the cost reports, and all the other financial reports, are telling you, the easier you will find it to manage your project budgets and answer questions about the money side. |
Posted on: May 25, 2026 12:00 AM
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How real PM mentoring actually works
Categories:
Mentoring
Categories: Mentoring
| Does your organisation have a mentoring scheme? Some companies have schemes where they match individuals to mentors. Others publish mentoring ‘packs’ or training information so individuals can work it out between themselves, but within the guidance and expectations of the Learning & Development Team. The trouble with formal schemes – in my view – is that they make it hard to sustain meaningful mentoring relationships, and it’s not because of motivation, it’s part of the design. Formal mentoring can stallIf your company has a structured scheme, you might find it takes ages to be matched with someone, because normally there are more people wanting a mentor than there are mentors to go round. The mentor matching process is structured and that puts a big burden on the HR team to do the matching. Plus, you might end up with someone with whom you don’t ‘click’. In a formal scheme, it feels like there is pressure to ‘add value’ and show that to be the case. Mentoring in practiceWhat mentoring looks like in practice is short, focused conversations. It’s those calls when a colleague rings you and asks for a second opinion. It’s context-specific advice, often between peers. It’s you sharing some insight with your manager (reverse mentoring) and informal check ins when you know a colleague has had a hard day. As project managers, we mentor all the time, probably without thinking much about it. Any time you’ve said, “I know where that policy is, let me show you,” or, “Here’s how to raise that request, I know because I did it last week,” that’s mentoring.
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Mentoring without burning out
Posted on: May 11, 2026 12:00 AM
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The Accidental Product Manager: What project managers need to know
Categories:
product management
Categories: product management
I don’t know about you, but it sometimes feels as if me, and my project management colleagues, are already doing some product work. If you’re a project manager but have ended up pigeonholed in a particular software environment, or you’re attached to an agile team or unit, then you might find that a lot of your work centres around one product (or a few). hat can feel quite unsettling, and several times on mentoring calls project manager have asked me if it’s normal that they are doing work that could feasibly be considered as BAU. I think, the answer is yes. The job title might lag behind reality, but in practice, there could be a bit of merging of roles if that is what the company needs. Whether that makes it a ‘proper’ project management job? The jury is still out on that one. Project managers can drift into product roles because they are on long-life teams with continuous delivery models. There’s a focus on outcomes over outputs, so you’re naturally thinking in business terms, value and benefits. There are iterative deliveries and the work never seems to end. All these factors feed into making the job feel like it’s a long-term product delivery role, instead of a traditional ‘work on a project, close it and move to the next’ type role. And that might suit some people who want to build subject matter expertise, and who enjoy working with the same team and technology. There’s certainly nothing to worry about if this is how your project management role has ended up (as long as that fits with your career plans). We all know that a project is defined by a distinct time horizon. It will have measures of success and relationship to customers and users (as a product role would have). Projects have funding and prioritisation, and product roles will need to work within those parameters as well. If you’re keen on product management, then that gentle shift could be a great move for you. There are a lot of project management skills that translate well into a Product Owner role. Like stakeholder facilitation, risk and dependency management, structured decision-making and communication under uncertainty – all these things will put you in a good position to be able to make smart product-led choices, whether it is formally part of your role or not. If you do want to make the shift more permanent, it would help to develop some skills in value framing for those stakeholder conversations, being able to work with a hypothesis and being comfortable testing things out, and definitely living with ambiguity. You’ll also need to be comfortable feeling like you can put together a product roadmap, like the (very simple and incomplete) one I've shared above as an example. In my experience, project managers tend to be a little bit more comfortable living with control, and you might find a product role naturally has less of that, but it depends. Product thinking can make us valuable as project managers, even if you are working alongside a Product Owner or team, because it helps us empathise with stakeholders. It’s an extension of what you do and you can adopt that product-based mindset without changing your job. And then, if you want to shift roles, it could be quite a straightforward shift. What do you think? Does your project management role include elements of product-based work, especially where there isn’t a Product Owner in post yet? Let me know in the comments! |
Posted on: May 04, 2026 12:00 AM
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How healthy are your project finances?
Categories:
financial management
Categories: financial management
| OK, we’re part way through the year and the reforecasting is already upon us! Unless your budgets have been managed to the penny and everything is on track, chances are you are probably facing some reforecasting for the remainder of the year. In my experience, many project managers are accountable for budgets but lack confidence in financial health – it’s one of the things I talk to project managers about in my mentoring calls a lot. But the thing is that financial problems rarely appear suddenly. They creep in quietly, in a little overspend here or there, or a supplier delay that doesn’t feel like a lot until it’s pushed your spend into next month and you’re dealing with accruals. So April is an ideal moment for a quick, painless financial health check before issues harden into forecasts. |
Posted on: April 23, 2026 10:00 AM
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Is it time to rethink your PM career path?
Categories:
Career Development
Categories: Career Development
| There’s something about spring that makes me want to rethink everything – maybe it’s the fact that everything seems to be renewed, I know this is not an original thought! What it means for us at work is that I am hearing a lot of people talking about taking a moment to think about their career. Especially for those of us who are slightly older, we don’t want to end up with career drift instead of career choice. We want career moves to be meaningful and part of a rounded picture for the direction we want to take, instead of simply floating into the next role because it’s offered. Staying busy is good, but not at the expense of ending up somewhere you never expected to go. But it’s difficult to ‘plan’ your careerThe trouble with career reassessment exercises, or even a simple reflection on a Friday night with your favourite drink, is that the project management culture values resilience and ‘pushing through’. We are the doers, the people who drive change and get things done. Yes, there is of course space for lessons learned and reflection in the role, but there is a worry about appearing uncommitted if you are actively talking about career reflection and whether or not you are in the right place. It’s the conversation we need to have outside of our immediate line management team or colleagues because you never know, it might not come to anything. Also, I think in project management there is a lack of clear alternative paths. Unless you are up for taking larger and more strategically important (and therefore stressful projects), where do you go? What’s right for you?Think about these questions: What work energises me now? What work drains me? Where am I adding the most value? And then think about your skills: What skills am I underusing? What do I want less of? The GROW Model is a good starting point as well. It stands for:
 I know a lot of people are low-level job hunting for a portion of their time and if the perfect job came up, they’d jump ship. So you need to know what you are looking for in case it falls in your lap. Where could you go?There are lots of job titles now that are PM-adjacent including:
Chat to your mentorIf you have a mentor, this is exactly the kind of thing your mentoring relationship is for. You should be able to talk to them informally, in confidence, about what you are thinking with regards to your current role. And any future role you might have in mind. They are not decision-makers in your life, but they will have an interesting perspective and can probably share some of their own thoughts from their career choices. If you don’t have a mentor, there are probably colleagues you trust, or friends or family members you could discuss with, or even type your thoughts into ChatGPT or Copilot (but take the output with a pinch of salt!). Career reflection is something we should all be doing because time passes quickly, and you want to steer your ship in the right direction for you. Don’t get me wrong, that direction is likely to change over time, but it’s better to have a loose plan than no plan at all. And project managers are great at planning, right? |
Posted on: April 13, 2026 08:00 AM
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