Cost management and planning

Given the complex and large-scale nature of many infrastructure projects, adequately planning, managing and reporting costs is fundamental to project and programme success.

Cost management is the management of actual performance and associated cost against that identified in the cost baseline. In doing so, cost management will include outputs from scope, schedule, change estimating, risk and value management in order to determine trends that in turn lead to estimated costs at completion.

Other areas related to cost are then explored, such as value management and benchmarking, change control, and cost forecasting and financial reporting. This section is closely related to Cost reporting on major programmes and should be read in conjunction with it.

This section is maintained by Simon Longstaffe of Mace Ltd.