Goal: Monitor costs

Monitoring your project's costs is very important to your project's financial success. Monitoring costs involves reviewing the basic cost information on a repeated basis, as well as performing a more detailed analysis of cost information.

To keep your project on budget, you may want to identify cost problems by reviewing cost totals and cost variances that occur over time, so that you can make adjustments, if needed.

Tip: This article is part of a series of articles within the Project Map that describe a broad set of project management activities. We call these activities "goals" because they are organized around the project management life cycle: Build a plan, track and manage a project, and close a project.

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Review the project costs     By examining the project's current, actual, baseline, and remaining cost totals, you can establish whether your project will stay within budget. View project costs Review the cost variances     If you set a baseline for your project, you can quickly see where the current (or scheduled) cost totals differ from the budgeted costs for tasks, resources, or assignments. Create or update a baseline or an interim plan Find the costs that are over budget     Once you set a baseline for your project, you can quickly focus on the tasks or resources with cost overruns. View project costs Analyze cost performance     By using earned value analysis to compare your expected progress and costs with the actual progress and costs to date for tasks that have resources assigned, you can determine whether you will run out of money before the tasks are completed. Analyze project performance with earned value analysis

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