Project Management
cost
Construction Industry, Construction Law, Contract Administration
The Cash Cow
On demand’ guarantee bonds are a typical form of contractual security in the UAE construction industry, particularly on large projects. Their use in theory, is to afford the employer with secured funds from a surety, in the event the defaulting party does not perform under a contract or becomes insolvent.
Prior to the onset of the liquidity crisis last year, the general attitude of an employer (as a beneficiary) would have been to threaten the encashment of a bond to impose commercial pressure on a contractor to perform. A call upon an on-demand bond would have been made if strictly necessary e.g. in the event of material or persistent default. …
PMP Hints, Project Management
Configuration Management
There are two major definitions for configuration management.
- It can be a term given to the identification, tracking and managing of all the assets of a project. This definition would be especially relevant on software development projects where the “configuration” refers to the collection of artifacts, code components, executables, etc. The items that you will track under configuration management are called “configuration items” in the Capability Maturity Model (CMMI). These configuration items can be interpreted quite broadly to include things such as: …
PMP Hints
Estimating Productive Hours per Day
When estimating effort hours, duration and cost, you must start off with an estimate of effort hours. Without an idea of the effort hours, you cannot accurately estimate duration or cost. …
PMP Hints, Project Management
Techniques to Get back on Budget
Implement “Zero Tolerance” Scope Change Management
This technique can be applied to help remedy a project that is either over deadline or over budget. Many projects begin to trend over their budget because they are doing more work than they originally committed to as a result of poor scope change management. If you are at risk of missing your budget, the project manager must work with the client and team members to ensure that absolutely no unplanned work is being requested or worked on – even if it is just one hour – unless formal scope change management is invoked. To repeat – this does not mean that there can be no more scope change requests. It simply means that EVERY scope change request must go through scope change management (which should be happening anyway). All other energy should go into cutting costs and completing only the core work that was agreed to. …
Project Management
Estimate-To-Complete, or,…Guess What?!
By W. Scott Tidemann
During the life-cycle of a construction project, most contractors routinely predict in some fashion the project’s final job costs to determine whether it will be in a profit or loss position at completion. If these predictions are frequent, accurate and timely, the contractor can also often identify job problems, take appropriate action and mitigate or eliminate potential economic loss while the project is underway. Armed with this information, a contractor can make critical business decisions more confidently. …
PMP Hints
Estimating Techniques
The following techniques can be used at the project level or activity level, or for any sized work in-between. …
PMP Hints
Use a Project Audit to Validate Your Schedule and Budget Status
Sometimes the project manager can get too comfortable (or too uncomfortable) in how the project is progressing. In many cases, it makes sense to have an outside party come in to evaluate the project management processes being utilized and double-check that the project is progressing as expected. This “outside party” could be any qualified person outside of the project manager. …
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PMP Hints
Consider Earned Value Management for Understanding Schedule and Budget Status
Projects, especially larger ones, are never executed exactly as they are planned. Some activities finish early. Some finish late. Sometimes it is not easy to know if you are ahead of schedule or behind. Likewise, sometimes it is hard to know whether you are under budget or not. …
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PMP Hints
Estimating Effort
Effort hours must be estimated first, before duration and cost estimates can be prepared. Use the following process to estimate effort hours.
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Construction Industry
Cost escalation
Cost escalation is one of the major issues currently affecting the construction sector in the region. There are regular press reports on the extent to which the costs of steel, cement and labour have risen. …
PMP Hints
The Basic Concepts of Earned Value
In any project, the value to be gained is based on completing the work. From a customer perspective, the business value is achieved when the project is completed. If a project gets canceled 90% through completion, the business value might be zero.
However, earned value looks at this differently. With earned value, you are earning the value of the project on an incremental scale as the project is executing. When 50% of the work is completed, you could say that 50% of the value of the project has been realized as well. …