Week 4 – Assignment: Present your Budget Plan

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Instructions

This week you will work on developing the project baseline budget, which is part of the project plan.

Using your ongoing project scenario for your Signature Assignment, construct a balanced budget for your project, discussing each item and the rationale behind the estimated amounts, so that it is close to a real budget. Keep in mind both typical organizational financial constraints as well as theoretical and conceptual contexts for budgeting. You will need to support your budget justifications with scholarly references. These numbers and figures must be sustained by reasonable explanations that recreate a real budget.  

You can use software like MS Project or MS Excel for your budget table. A sample project budget is shown below for reference.

Figure 4.2: Sample Project Budget

After you have completed your balanced budget, prepare an executive summary justifying each item. As part of this summary, discuss how you used diverse cost estimation tools (rough order of estimates, budgetary estimates and definite estimates), and techniques like top-down estimates, bottom-up estimates, parametric modeling, and techniques for controlling costs.

Conclude the summary with a definition and discussion of earned value management (EVM), cost estimate and performance management technique, and the main values evaluated or calculated as part of the performance management measuring process (planned value [PV], actual cost [AC] and earned value [EV]).  As part of this discussion, Use the accompanying table to compute the earned value management (EVM) for the following scenario.

You are a project manager for a mobile app design project. The design, coding, testing, and implementation process will have a cost of $50,000 per function, screens, or views, and a security module. The project is scheduled to last three months (12 weeks). After three weeks since the project start, $30,000 has been spent, and only 3 modules out of 10 have been completed and deployed. Using the EVM formulas shown on the table below, calculate BAC, PV, EV, AC, CV, CPI, SPI.

As you work with this exercise as part of Sprint 3 of your project, research and discuss techniques for budget and cost management, starting with the EVM technique, and present your recommendations to manage and balance your project budget.

Figure 4.3: Example table

This assignment does not follow APA format expectations for citations and references. You must submit the budget table and the EVM calculations in a separate document or another tab in the budget spreadsheet. This will serve as Sprint 3 of your Signature Assignment—The Project Plan Proposal.

Length: 3-5 pages not including cover page and references.  The main document must include the budget table and the EVM analysis, and if the budget was developed using a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet file must also be submitted along with the budget plan. 

References: At least two scholarly references.