The Money Files

Project costs feels like a topic I’ve revisited many times over the course of writing this blog (can you believe I started it in May 2010?) and today I want to use my monthly video to go into the differences between direct and indirect costs and fixed and variable costs. They are terms new project managers might get confused about and we hear them thrown around in discussions. What do they mean for projects?

In this video I share a few examples of each so you can get a feel for how these might play out for your work. If you want a text-based post to refer back to, then this article on 5 types of project cost also includes some information on the topic.

Do you have different definitions or examples to share? Leave a comment under the video as this community is better for all the different voices in it!

You hear it all the time: “We want our project managers to add value.” “How are you adding value to the organisation?” “I want to spend more time on valued-added activities.”

But what does adding value actually mean?

I’m not a great fan of buzzwords that I can’t explain and turn into practical actions, so I’ve given this topic quite a lot of thought over the years. Here are 5 things I think you can do to add value (in a meaningful way) as a project manager.

1. Team building

Projects are done by people. People make up teams. Groups of people don’t have the same impact as a well-functioning team. Therefore, spending time on team building is worthwhile and will create value for the organisation because you’ll be better at delivering whatever it is you are delivering.

Focus on creating a positive work environment. Think about what people need to get their tasks done. Look for roadblocks you can remove, processes you can streamline. Talk about the blockers and why they are a problem.

And get some fun in there too.

2. Tenacity

Being committed to the team and the job, and the project, is a sure way to add value because it increases the chance the project will actually get done. How many projects do you know of that started but didn’t have the momentum to get across the line? That’s what tenacity will help you avoid.

Assuming you are working on the right projects, the ability to follow through and get the work done is important for making sure your time pays off for the company.

3. Relationship-building

This is such a large topic, which includes resolving conflict, smoothing over awkwardness, being diplomatic while speaking truth to power, respectful challenge and knowing who to connect and when. There’s a whole bunch of soft skills (or power skills, as it is trendy to call them now) that fall into this bucket.

They are important because this is what helps you get work done even when the environment is tricky. The more you listen, the more you understand and the easier it is to get your projects done. You’ll understand more of the business context that lets you make the right decisions that – you guessed it – lead to delivering a higher-value result.

4. Control the process

Governance might not seem like a particularly value-added thing to do, but when you understand and use the processes of project management, you can structure, standardise, save time, automate, compare and improve so much more easily.

If you have a standard approach, however informal, everyone knows what to do and what to expect and that takes some of the uncertainty out of what is normally a pretty uncertain time for people – projects deliver change and that comes with an overhead of having to live with not knowing exactly what the future will look like. That can be an added source of anxiety and stress for the team and wider stakeholder community.

5. Change management

Projects start to feel out of control when change is not managed appropriately, and that’s when stakeholders start to get nervous. You can help your projects be more successful and ‘land’ better with the receiving organisation, if you manage change properly.

That goes for both the process-led effort of receiving and handling change requests as part of your project management work, and also integrating what you are delivering into the business in a way that makes it possible for the benefits to be received as soon as possible, with the least disruption. Benefits = value.

How do you interpret ‘adding value’ as a project manager? I think it could go much further than what I’ve written here. I’m sure there are many other ways of looking at our role and how we can serve our stakeholder communities in the most value-adding way. Let me know by leaving a comment below!

The Standard for Program Management, Fourth Edition (2017) defines Program Financial Management like this:

Activities related to identifying the program’s financial sources and resources, integrating the budgets of the program components, developing the overall budget for the program, and controlling costs during the program.

As you can see, there’s a lot more to crunching the numbers for program finances than simply having a single budget spreadsheet!

Let’s look into that definition a bit more and I’ll give some examples from my work as a programme manager (as we would spell programme in the UK).

Identifying financial sources

This means finding out where the money is coming from. In a large program, you might have a single source of funding, or several. Research projects, for example, might have grant income, so within the program you might have several funding sources.

On the large healthcare program I led, the Finance team created a brand new cost centre for the work so everything could be tracked in one place. Funding was centrally agreed and moved into that cost centre.

Identifying resources

This sounds easy, but in practice a large part of my role as a program manager was finding the right people to do the work and then helping them find the time to actually do their tasks! Admittedly, it’s a lot easier if your program has dedicated resources.

For some of my work, we’ve been able to budget for backfilled resources so we could bring people out of their day job and second them to projects. Then the project could pay for someone to cover their job while they dedicated their expertise to the work.

Integrating budgets of program components

Programs are made up of several (sometimes many) different projects and often a BAU component too. As a result, the program manager has to juggle the budgets and create a master, summary budget.

There’s work to be done here in making sure the whole thing is put together holistically and with the least repetition possible. For example, if you are securing a legal expert to support on one project, it makes sense that they are also kept on to help with another project as they will have gained some awareness of the program overall and the company. If the timelines can be made to work, or you can pitch a larger engagement for the legal consultant, you may be able to secure their time to get consistent resource (and maybe even a cheaper price for a longer engagement).

Developing the overall budget

When all the program components are effectively budgeted and you can bring the whole thing together, the program manager can create an overall budget and a way of tracking against that.

Controlling costs

Controlling costs is part of project, program and portfolio management, so it’s definitely up there as an important activity for program managers!

Luckily for me, my program costs were so large that I had the support of the Finance team – I think the company wanted the extra governance and accountability for having accountants pour over the details. Project budgets and costs were centrally managed and controlled in our cost centre. Tracking became a job of getting the data and consolidating it. Controlling costs became an issue of making sure change requests were done in an appropriate way and ensuring there was enough oversight of where we were spending the money.

We did not use EVM to track and monitor costs, but this might be part of your program management environment. If that is the case, you’ll probably have software to help you track and monitor costs and also to support with the reporting.

Summary

Program financial management might seem a daunting task but it’s very similar to managing your project budget. The numbers can be a lot bigger, but the maths is the same principles. What’s your experience of program financial management? I imagine it looks very different for every program as there are plenty of ways of setting up programs, and many variations on what financial management is necessary and appropriate.

Sunk costs… what a headache when it comes to decision making. In this video, I talk about what they are and why they are a problem. If you don’t feel they are a problem for you as a project manager, then all credit to you!

In summary, sunk costs are those that have already been paid out. They are budgeted expenditure that has already been committed – the company can’t get those funds back. I agree they absolutely that this expense shouldn’t cloud your judgement, but unfortunately not everyone in the project sphere feels the same way and often decisions are made with sunk costs playing a large part in what next steps are taken.

In my view, project sponsors who feel that saving face is more important than business value are most at risk from making choices that perhaps wouldn’t stand up to too much audit scrutiny when the project is reviewed for benefits in a couple of years’ time post-delivery. Having said that, everyone is at risk of feeling invested when they have poured effort into working on something.

We have to work really hard to make sure that sunk costs, and the emotion attached to a project, don’t play a part in tough decisions about the project’s future.

Watch the video and then share your thoughts in the comments below: am I right, or is there more to it? Can’t wait to hear your views!

If you’ve been working in project management for some time, you might be familiar with the idea of variance. However, new project managers, or those who haven’t had to prepare financial information about their projects before, might find the idea a bit harder to get their heads around. Keep reading – this is for you!

I was speaking to one such project manager recently. While she had a ton of experience, she hadn’t needed to provide financial information for her projects as it wasn’t part of her stakeholders’ expectations. When the costs are mainly internal resource, many companies don’t require project managers to work that out in money terms. We tend to just estimate in days or some other unit of time and that’s good enough.

However, there will come a point in your career where you will most likely be asked to start crunching budget numbers for your projects. As you move into environments with greater levels of project management maturity, for example, it becomes more important to track things across projects in a standard way.

Budgets for money are the same in principle as budgets for time: you still need to work out how much you need and how much you are using, just like you would for time tracking on a project where you are only estimating in person hours/days. There’s another ‘however’ coming though…

However, in many organisations, including those where I have worked, it isn’t always necessary to track time. You create a project estimate at the beginning that states how many hours etc are needed from a resource in order to secure that resource, but after that, people are simply expected to manage their own time and the project is expected to conclude on the day you said it would. Timesheets don’t feature.

So, moving from this loose ‘we make a guess at how long things will take and go from there’ environment to one where you are expected to submit project reports with variance figures each week can be quite a challenge!

Luckily, the maths is not complicated and while it might seem daunting (especially if the numbers are big), variance is easy to track.

Budget variance

Here’s how to calculate budget variance.

Variance = Actuals + forecast – budget

In other words, you add up what you’ve spent so far with what you still have left to go, and compare that the original approved budget. The difference is the variance and shows whether you are under or over spent.

At the very beginning of the project the actuals are zero as you haven’t done anything yet. Each reporting period, simply pop the actuals into the right column and adjust the forecast down. Assuming you are on track, that is!

If you aren’t on track to hit your original estimates, you should be reforecasting the still-to-do work and noting those figures in the forecast column. Forecasts can change for lots of reasons including:

• The team created estimates that were based on assumptions that haven’t held true
• The team wasn’t very good at estimating
• More work has been added to the project as the result of a change request
• Work has been removed from the project as the result of a change request
• Resources have changed and now you are working with someone less experienced who will take longer to do the tasks
• Something else!

If you keep your forecast and actuals columns up to date, the rest is easy!

Tolerance

Normally there would be some tolerance agreed for the variance. For example, being under or over by 10% of the budget is OK but anything over that needs escalating to management or a change request etc.

Setting tolerance with your project sponsor will prevent you from having nightmares every time your project report says you are a few percentage points over budget.

How to get started

Make a spreadsheet that has the various columns. The simplest way is to have one column per field (actuals, forecast, budget, variance) and note the figures overall. As you get comfortable doing that, you might want to break them down by month to get a better idea of how things are tracking over time.

Once you’ve played with your project’s figures and have put together a spreadsheet to track them yourself (I recommend doing that instead of starting from someone else’s template so you can see how they fit together and what sums sit behind the columns) then you’ll get used to working out the numbers in this way.

I’m not a maths whizz by any means and I can manage it, so I’m sure you can too!