Ever have a p 
roject over budget? Even if you monitor costs regularly, you may not always know if you are trending over your budget. First of all, you rarely spend money at a constant rate. So, you need to understand what you expected to spend during the period, as well as what you actually spent. In most companies, financial information also comes in on a lag. So, if you feel your project is trending over budget, you must first validate the cause. If you can determine the cause, you will have a much better idea of what options are available to try to get back on track. There are a number of techniques you can apply to try to rein in spending to get back within your budget.
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Work Unpaid Overtime . This option takes advantage of the situation where your employee staff does not get paid for overtime.
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Swap Human Resources . If you were trending over your deadline, you may want to swap resources to get your project back on schedule.
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Eliminate or Replace Non-Labor Costs . Just as with people, it may be possible to utilize less costly materials, supplies or services than what was originally budgeted.
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“Zero Tolerance” Scope Change . Many projects begin to trend over their budget because they are doing more work that they originally committed to.
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Use Budget Contingency (If You Have it). If you are lucky, your initial budget included a contingency to account for the uncertainty and risk associated with your estimate.
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Improve Processes . There may be cost overruns caused by inefficient internal processes. Get team member feedback and look for ways that are within your team’s internal control to streamline processes.
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Regain Commitments . Work with team members to evaluate future work, re-validate estimates, and gain commitments to complete the remaining work within budget.
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Scope Back the Work . One option that is usually available for both an overbudget and over-deadline situation is to look at the work remaining and negotiate with the client to remove some of it from the project.
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Stop doing it . This is my favorite one. Many times you are doing things just because. Because why? If you question if something has value, just stop doing and see what happens. If no one says anything?
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Ask the Customer . Involve your customer. You may find out that his expectations have already been reached or changed during the process. So by asking and keeping your customer involved may be exactly the secret sauce that you need.
If you need some great project management training, take a look at the Ten Step Project Management system.
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