Subtitles of the Movie

Within your Work Files you will find a knowledge area specific assessment document. In this movie, we will review the cost related assessment. If you haven't gone through this exercise yet, I highly suggest doing so before reviewing this movie. The assessment covers a few high level items of the knowledge area including the overall purpose of the knowledge area, the processes that make up the knowledge area, the purpose of each individual process, and the primary outputs generated within each process. In regards to a high level understanding of the knowledge area, cost is fairly easy to grasp. The purpose itself is very clear cut, to complete the project within budget. As you may recall from the knowledge area overview movies, the cost knowledge area is concerned with the cost of resources needed to complete the schedule activities. It also involves literally the management of project cost, therefore the project team also considers the effects of project decisions on the product or services that the project is undertaken to create. There are only three processes within the project cost knowledge area, cost estimating, cost budgeting, and cost control. The assessment also tests your knowledge of the process group that each process belongs to. In this case, cost estimating belongs to the planning process group, as does cost budgeting. And cost control belongs to the monitoring and controlling process group. Within most of the processes, if you know what the purpose is, you can determine which process group it belongs to. Estimating and budgeting are planning activities, and any time you see control in the title of the process, it belongs to the monitoring and controlling process group. Let's review the purpose of these three processes. Cost estimating is responsible for developing the cost estimates of all scheduled activities. Cost budgeting is responsible for creating the cost baseline by aggregating the estimated cost of the schedule activities or work packages. And cost control is responsible for influencing the factors that create cost variance within the project and controlling changes to the project budget. Knowing the key outputs of each process is a great benefit and allows you an important window into the process. If you know what the process is aiming to generate, you can piece together what information is needed to generate these results, and what tools and techniques allow you to utilize the inputs. This is a great exercise to go through and it helps you to avoid feeling as though you need to memorize the inputs, the tools and techniques, or the outputs for the exam. Key outputs of the cost estimating process include the activity cost estimates and the activity cost estimate supporting detail. The supporting detail is to cost estimates what the WBS dictionary is to the WBS, and what activity attributes are to the activity list. Key outputs of the cost budgeting process include the cost baseline and project funding requirements. And key outputs of the cost control process include performance measurements and forecasted completion. There are several updates included here as well, most notably to the cost estimates and the cost baseline through the requested changes. And that wraps up the project cost management knowledge area assessment review. Now that you've gauged where you are in terms of project cost, I suggest going through the individual process movies and then going back and taking the assessment exercise once again after going through these movies to compare how much more information you've retained. And that concludes this movie. In the next section, we'll begin a review of the individual cost related processes.