Cost control with statistic tools

Introduction

Cost control is one of the major parts in the cost management in Project management. Cost control is the process of monitoring project status to update project costs and managing changes to the cost baseline. The main benefit of this process is that the cost baseline is maintained throughout the project. The appropriateness of this process is that the cost baseline is maintained throughout the project. [yinyong].

The major component of the Project cost control includes:

• Influencing the factors that create changes to the authorized cost baseline;
• Ensuring that all change requests are acted on in a timely manner;
• Managing the actual changes when and as they occur;
• Ensuring that cost expenditures do not exceed the authorized funding by period, by WBS component, by activity, and in total for the project;
• Monitoring cost performance to isolate and understand variances from the approved cost baseline;
• Monitoring work performance against funds expended;
• Preventing unapproved changes from being included in the reported cost or resource usage;
• Informing appropriate stakeholders of all approved changes and associated cost; and
• Bringing expected cost overruns within acceptable limits.

key reference:

1. Project Management: A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide) 6th Edition (2017)
2. Project Management Institute(PMI). (2005) "Practice Standard for Earned Value Management"
3. Aliverdi, R., Moslemi Naeni, L., & Salehipour, A. (2013). Monitoring project duration and cost in a construction project by applying statistical quality control charts. International Journal of Project Management, 31(3), 411–423. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2012.08.005
4. Hadian, H., & Rahimifard, A. (2019). Multivariate statistical control chart and process capability indices for simultaneous monitoring of project duration and cost. Computers and Industrial Engineering, 130(March), 788–797. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2019.03.021