Subtitles of the Movie

Now that we've had an opportunity to review the cost knowledge area basics, we'll shift over to the interaction and flow of the knowledge area processes in this movie. Although there are only three processes within the cost knowledge area, there is a great deal of interactions with processes outside of the knowledge area. We provide the necessary information for the cost related processes to keep the project on budget. Let's begin with the cost estimating process, as a reminder, this process estimates the cost of resources needed to complete each scheduled activity. As a start, the process team utilizes historical information and organizational policies through the organizational process assets and market place conditions and commercial databases through the Enterprise environmental factors. As you may have anticipated, we need the activity list and the work breakdown structure to do this which we would obtain through the scope definition and create WBS processes, both of which are part of the time knowledge area. Something else that is important is the project management plan, which contains the cost management plan. Once the activity costs are estimated, this information is utilized in the next process, cost budgeting. Here, the cost baseline is created, the cost budgeting process utilizes three things, select seller process which contains information from the contracts of vendors that will complete part of the project work. The contract will contain cost, there's also resource calendars from the activity resource estimating process. Resource calendars will tell us the availability, the capability, and skills of the human resources and the type, quantity, availability, and capability of equipment and material resources. And the third item utilizes the project schedule which comes from the schedule development process. With the schedule activity cost estimated, and the cost baseline created, we are now left with controlling variances to the project cost through the cost control process. Here, we'll utilize performance reports generated through the performance reporting process and work performance information from the direct and manage project execution process. The results of the cost control process are then fed into the monitor and control project work process which we reviewed during the integration knowledge area, and the close project process where organizational process assets are updated. As has been a recurring action during all process flow interactions, after going through the processes, necessary changes emerge. The changes are submitted to the integrated change control board through the integrated change control process. In this knowledge area, all three processes may result in requested changes. Although it's not shown in the diagram, approved changes are then fed into the processes and updates to the project management plan are likely to occur as a result of the changes. And that concludes the overview of the process interactions and process flow of the project cost management knowledge area. Since some of these processes may have been new to you, I always recommend coming back to this movie after having gone through the individual process reviews for a better understanding of the process flow.