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Project Budgeting and Estimating: Taking Control of Your Projects

 
Course: 923     Type: RealityPlus     Duration: 3 Days

Quick Enroll    

You Will Learn How To
  • Create an accurate budget for any level of work from individual project tasks to entire portfolios
  • Estimate tasks using activity-based costing, and aggregate to project budgets
  • Quantify risk to justify contingency funding and produce a defensible baseline
  • Manage the master budget, allocating funds to projects with the best rate of return
  • Align the organization's budget with the customer value proposition and strategic objectives
  • Leverage Earned Value Analysis to determine project status, forecasts and any necessary corrections

Course Benefits
Project managers are under constant pressure to deliver their projects under budget, yet projects in every industry often exceed their original budgets. This course provides the skills to estimate realistic budgets for completing planned project scope. You also learn how to leverage an approved baseline budget to support the organization's strategic objectives.

Who Should Attend
Anyone who wants to learn about budgeting, including project and program managers, department managers and team members. Project management experience at the level of Course 296, "Project Management: Skills for Success," or Course 340, "Project Management for Software Development," is strongly recommended.

Through an authentic case study-based simulation, you gain experience creating and managing a budget on a large-scale project. Role-playing, individual and team activities include:
  • Estimating individual task costs using various tools
  • Conducting peer reviews of individual estimates
  • Categorizing costs
  • Building the budget baseline
  • Adding contingency funding
  • Creating an earned value performance report
  • Forecasting and recommending next steps
  • Determining projects to fund
  • Identifying budget policy violations
  • Constructing a cash flow
  • Leveraging lessons learned

Course 923 Content
Introduction to Project Budgeting and Estimating
  • Preparing realistic budgets
  • Burning through a project budget
  • What's in it for me: living within your budget
Aligning Budgets from Small to Large
Structuring budgets and defining roles
  • Delegating individual budgeting activities
  • Connecting project, program and business budgets
Leveraging the four functions of the budget
  • Planning and justifying the project
  • Coordinating and communicating between stakeholders
  • Monitoring progress
  • Evaluating budget performance
Cost Estimating at the Individual Task Level
Activity-Based Costing (ABC)
  • Working with the Cost Breakdown Structure (CBS)
  • Relating the CBS to the budget based on the organization's standards
Categorizing costs
  • Determining activity-level direct, indirect and other costs
  • Aggregating tasks up to total individual costs
Project-Level Budgeting
Mapping to the project life cycle
  • Correlating budget detail to the life cycle stage
  • Producing deliverables that facilitate phase-gate decisions
Working with estimation tools
  • Adjusting an analogous estimate to suit your current project
  • Calculating the budget using parametric Cost Estimating Relationships (CERs)
  • Increasing confidence levels with three-point estimating
Incorporating project-level cost categories
  • Accounting for resource commitment levels
  • Collecting individual cost estimates
  • Adding in overhead and general and administrative costs
Forming the interim cost baseline
  • Determining the Total Project Cost
  • Managing the team's estimation process
  • Setting the standard of estimation
  • Conforming to granularity and accuracy requirements
Quantifying Risk and Finalizing the Baseline
Analyzing quantitative risk
  • Assessing probability
  • Establishing the monetary value of the impact
Allocating a contingency budget
  • Prioritizing risks using a Pareto analysis
  • Locating and controlling contingency
Declaring and revalidating project value
  • Valuating hard and soft savings
  • Stating the customer's value proposition for baseline approval
Structuring the Master Budget
Deriving the content of the master budget
  • Generating the Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimate
  • Applying PERT analysis to the entire project
Defending your project budgets
  • Calculating rate of return
  • Balancing project and opportunity costs
Budgeting to Align with the Business Unit
Strategic positioning
  • Gauging your competition
  • Trading off costs and benefits for maximum return
Forecasting future values
  • Calculating potential results using decision trees
  • Making predictions using Net Present Value (NPV)
Managing cash flow
  • Constructing the balance sheet
  • Graphing your cash expenditures
  • Conforming to imposed budget constraints
Improving the organization's budgeting process
  • Controlling quality with SWOT and Lean Six Sigma
  • Applying Kaizen for continuous process improvement
  • Impacting the organization's bottom line
Measuring Budget Performance with EVA
  • Performing budget-based Earned Value Analysis (EVA)
  • Correcting for variance from baseline
  • Forecasting budget performance based on actuals
  • Determining when to re-baseline
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Save Up to 45% per course on the standard tuition!

Project Budgeting and Estimating: Taking Control of Your Projects
Upcoming Dates
Apr 8 - 10, 2009
 Washington, DC (Reston, VA)
May 6 - 8, 2009
 New York
May 13 - 15, 2009
 Ottawa
May 27 - 29, 2009
 Washington, DC (Rockville, MD)
Jun 3 - 5, 2009
 Toronto
Jun 10 - 12, 2009
 Chicago (Schaumburg)
Jun 24 - 26, 2009
 Washington, DC (Alexandria, VA)
Jul 8 - 10, 2009
 Los Angeles
Jul 15 - 17, 2009
 Washington, DC (Reston, VA)
Aug 12 - 14, 2009
 New York

Project Budgeting and Estimating: Taking Control of Your Projects
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Course Tuition
$ 2,390 Standard Tuition
Tuition with a Savings Plan
$ 1,350 10-Day Pass
$ 1,670 Training Passport
$ 1,625 Premium-Pass
$ 2,200 Voucher 10-Pack
$ 2,155 Alumni Gold Discount
$ 2,124 Government Discount
 

 

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