Cost management and planning

Many infrastructure projects can be complex and large-scale. Therefore, 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. It includes outputs from scope, schedule, change estimating, risk and value management in order to determine trends that, in turn, lead to estimated costs at completion.

This section also explores other areas related to cost, such as

• value management and benchmarking
• change control and
• cost forecasting and financial reporting.

The 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.

RICS journal article: Part one: How do we improve cost estimating?

RICS journal article: Part two: How do we improve cost estimating?

Template: Cost report