Delivering a project within budget

 Here are some tips for delivering a project within budget:

Set a realistic budget

Define the project's scope and necessary resources, and create a budget that's realistic.

Cost estimate

Segment the project into smaller tasks and milestones to plan how to use resources and provide clarity.

Divide the project plan

Break down the project into tasks to avoid late deliverables and over-budget projects.

Monitor progress

Regularly track the project's progress to identify and prevent cost overruns. Use progress reports to compare actual costs to the budget.

Anticipate and revise changes

Communicate with stakeholders to identify and assess risks, and assign owners to each risk.

Consider different scenarios

Estimation can be difficult for complex projects with many potential outcomes.

Tracking:

Tracking time spent on tasks, Tracking expenses per project, and Using project management software.

Use Historical Data

Your project is likely not the first to try and accomplish a specific objective or goal. Looking back at similar projects and their budgets is a great way to get a headstart on building your budget.

Reference Lessons Learned

To further elaborate on historical data, you can learn from their successes and mistakes. It provides a clear path that leads to more accurate estimates. You can even learn about how they responded to changes and kept their budget under control. Here’s a lessons learned template if you need to start tracking those findings in your organization.

Leverage Your Experts

Another resource to build a project budget is to tap those who have experience and knowledge—be they mentors, other project managers or experts in the field. Reaching out to those who have created rough order of magnitude estimates and budgets can help you stay on track and avoid unnecessary pitfalls.

Confirm Accuracy

Once you have your budget, you’re not done. You want to look at it and ensure your figures are accurate. You can use our project budget proposal template for this process. You can also seek those experts and other project team members to check the budget and make sure it’s right.

Baseline and Re-Baseline the Budget

Your project budget is the baseline by which you’ll measure your project’s progress once it has started. It’s a tool to gauge the variance of the project. But, as stated, you’ll want to re-baseline as changes occur in your project. Once the change control board approves any change you need to re-baseline.

Update in Real Time

Speaking of changes, the sooner you know about them, the better. If your project planning software isn’t cloud-based and updating as soon as your team changes its status, then you’re wasting valuable and expensive time.

Get on Track

The importance of having a project management software that tracks in real time, is that it gives you the information you need to get back on track sooner rather than later. Things change and projects go off track all the time. It’s the projects that get back on track faster that are successful.

If you manage your project expenses using these building blocks you’re going to have a sound foundation for your project’s success.