As a project manager you should produce performance measurements of your project.
These could be measurements such as:
- Planned Value
- Earned Value
- Actual Cost
- Budget At Completion
- Estimate At Completion
- Estimate To Complete
- Cost Variance
- Schedule Variance
- Cost Performance Index
- Schedule Performance Index
- Estimate At Completion
- Estimate to Complete
Many of these can be automated outputs (depending on your software tools).
They are important to supply to management and are the easiest and most specific way of presenting your project status to management.
They help you know if your project is over or under budget and also ahead of or behind schedule. They should be checked regularly (at least once a month for long projects) to spot problems.
In some cases you should present the schedule measurements to the client.
The Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK) from the Project Management Institute (PMI) (www.pmi.org) has details of all of these performance measurements in its “Cost Management” section.
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