Understanding Commitments, Expenditures & Payments

Before we discuss commitments, expenditures and payments, the concept of cash flow must be addressed. Commitments, expenditure and payment plans and curves are often mistakenly confused with cash flow...

Foundations of Finance: Impact of Interest Rates on Equities

Interest rates are something nearly everyone is familiar with, and likely not a fan of. An interest rate is a cost associated with borrowing money from any given source.

Understanding Contingency

Many are familiar with the concept of project contingency, but may not know how the value is initially calculated, when it is drawn from, and how to effectively generate an appropriate draw down curve. First let’s review the general concept of project contingency and its purpose. When estimating the...

5 Reasons to Record Meeting Minutes

Meeting minutes are essential. Many of you likely spend your entire day in meetings, and often the result of a meeting is to have another meeting. You can easily become overwhelmed with deliverables that result from a meeting, or even directions you need to provide to your team. This...

Types of Project Conflicts

There are different types of project conflicts found among teams and managers, due to differing personalities and sense of priorities. A good project manager needs to anticipate such conflicts and be able to resolve them amicably for the success of the project. This is indeed a challenging task. The...

Understanding the Change Management Process

Change management is the backbone of project cost control. After all, if there was never any change or deviation from your original plan, and things went exactly as they should, there would be little need for project controls. Being that change will occur on each and every project, it...

Understanding the Project Baseline

A project baseline serves as the basis against which you are going to deliver your project and measure its success. It is a critical document essential to successfully deliver a project on schedule and within budget. Without, a project has no plan, vision or execution strategy needed for a...

5 Benefits to Performing a Quantitative Schedule Risk Analysis

There are two primary types of risk analysis: qualitative and quantitative assessments. A qualitative assessment is an evaluation that relies on the experience and knowledge of key project stakeholders to identify items that have the potential to impact the schedule. A qualitative assessment involves evaluating an order of magnitude...