Passed the hurdle of having an accurate view of current costs (see the White Paper 2012-05, “How to Be On Top of Your Costs: the Art of Mastering Commitments“), the next issue facing the project team is to have a firm grasp on the forecast to the project completion.
What Project Controls needs to avoid absolutely: surprised by the bill!
The objective for the project leader is to make sure that the current knowledge of the situation is appropriately reflected in the cost forecast, so that there are “no surprises” due to uncontrolled areas that would have been overseen. While that sounds simple, the practice is a bit more complicated… Discover how to achieve this objective in our new White Paper, White Paper 2012-06.
After discussing what “no surprises” really means, we discuss how the project forecast needs to be updated to take into account all relevant new knowledge. In the process we discuss some common failures we observe in this area, mainly due to lack of communication and understanding between the different functions of the project.
We also discuss whether and how to dampen small variances between reporting periods, and overall what is the recipe for project controls success.
Read White Paper (2012-06 “No Surprises: the Recipe for Consistent Project Controls”).
