Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Reducing Project Costs

You’ve diligently entered costs into your project plan and either looked at the resulting cost totals as described in Reviewing Project Costs on page 303 or compared your planned costs against your budget, as described in Comparing Costs to Your Budget on page 273. If your target is $100,000 and your costs are coming out to $130,000, you have to figure out how to trim $30,000 from your planned project costs or heads will roll—most likely yours. How do you go about cutting thousands of dollars from a project? Answer: very carefully.

First, look at your cost assumptions to make sure mistakes haven’t sent project costs into the stratosphere. If you’re lucky, you can correct a misplaced zero and everything will be hunky-dory. The next line of defense is to reschedule tasks to reduce costs. You can also examine resource assignments to look for ways to cut costs.

Note

For more information about viewing costs in your project plan, including running cost reports, see Reviewing Project Costs and Using Project Cost Reports.

This section discusses each of these cost-cutting techniques. However, if these methods aren’t enough to solve your budget crisis, it’s time to take a hard look at the budget itself and propose a change to the project’s budget, scope, or schedule.

Checking for Cost Errors

When your TV suddenly doesn’t turn on or you can’t get the channel that’s showing world championship bass fishing, you probably don’t schedule a technician service call right away. You ...