The International Community for Project Managers (ICPM)

Everyone knows that when a recession occurs, executives tend to look for ways to cut costs, anticipating the possibility that demand for the company’s products and services will drop. Yet what if you could know exactly where your company is profitable and where it's not, allowing you to do more of the profitable work? What if you got rid of unprofitable customers instead of the industrious employees that helped grow the company?

You could have heard that several times.
How much time it will take to complete that?
Two months. But we can't complete that project in two months from now.
Why? Isn't that just a matter of resources?
No it's not. Whole core team is at the moment fully engaged in other project and we'd need at least two of them here.
Let's take two of them then.
OK, but consider the other project as late by half of the year. Fair enough?
No. Can't you find other people to do job?
Yes I can. I will have them in the office in 2-3 moths. And after another half of the year they'll be ready to undertake the task...

I have really messed up my checkbook.  It started around Christmas time.  When I tried to balance it in January I failed miserably.  Since I can balance the budget for a multi-million dollar project I should be able to handle a checkbook that borders on empty every month.  Even with a new Quicken file in February, I was still unsuccessful this weekend in determining what I have left.  If I don’t get it right I won’t know how much I have available and will likely end up bouncing checks. What surprises me is the number of project managers that don’t put the effort in to balance their project budget.  Every time someone expends effort on your project it is like a check being posted against your account.  If you don’t capture and track those transactions you will eat through your budget faster than high school kids through your refrigerator.   Here are 4 basic concepts of budget management to put into practice.

Earned Value - Earned value management is a project management technique for estimating how a project is doing in terms of its budget and schedule. It compares the work finished so far with the estimates made in the beginning of the project. This gives a measure of how far the project is from completion. Through EV the project manager can get an estimate on how much resources the project will have used at completion. “Earned Value Analysis” is an industry standard way to measure a project’s progress, forecast its completion date and final cost and provide schedule and budget variances along the way. By integrating three measurements, it provides consistent, numerical indicators with which you can evaluate and compare projects.