以下文字节选自历年真题，划线部分为结合案例进行分析的部分，未划线部分为通用文字（需要熟练掌握），考试时结合案例进行具体分析。

Project controls

Expenditure and cost performance

Expenditure starts with the establishment of budgets and as the project progresses, decisions regarding procurement, design and development will be assessed with respect to their impact on expenditures. A robust tender process is also essential to success.

At a very simple level, at one month of reporting on the hotel project 11% of the project activities might be complete and should have cost $2·31m this would be the budgeted cost of work performed (BCWP). This would be compared to the actual cost of work performed (ACWP) and would show the cost variance after one month of the project.

BCWP/ACWP is referred to as the cost-performance index and is a measure of cost efficiency. Early in the project the index may be an unreliable guide to the costs of the rest of the project because it is based on insufficient data, but later in the project could be used to extrapolate ‘the cost to complete’. 

Schedule and time performance

Schedule performance refers to the timely completion of project deliverables as compared to a baseline plan. It is possible to calculate a schedule variance which would measure how much work has been achieved at a given date compared to what was scheduled.

The ability to accurately forecast helps meet the time-to-market window. Any delay in time will mean that the hotel opening will be delayed and the timescale for ROI will also be affected. If the project is slipping, it is important to know why it is slipping so that appropriate action can be taken to get the project back on track.

The schedule will identify all of the hotel’s stages, phases and activities assigned to each project team member, mapping them to a timeline which measures key milestones (dates) which are used to keep track of work progress. The key milestones might include: structural completion, utilities installation, decoration and room fitting completion as examples. Avoiding schedule slippage is a key objective.

It might be useful to create a key performance indicator (KPI) for the project indicating the percentage of tasks completed. It will be important to enter the planned time for each project activity so that the KPI will not reflect the number of various-sized tasks, but the time spent. This will give more accurate reporting and enable understanding of how far the project has progressed.

Quality performance and review

Cost of quality is the amount of money spent on the hotel project because the design and development was not carried out correctly in the first place. It will include labour, materials and other costs spent on design and development aspects of the hotel which do not meet the specifications or expectations and where further work has been required.

Quality is monitored by reviewing and testing what has been produced. For the hotel project, the review would take the form of a physical inspection and design review at the end of each stage of the renovation process. This would include physical inspections of electrical and installation work through to the interior design and furniture of the rooms themselves. The costs might include any rectification of poor quality work. The importance of the quality review is to agree which aspects of the design and renovation have been accepted as satisfactory and which problems have still to be resolved. The important action from this is that those responsible for solving the problems take action immediately. 

Issue management performance

Issue management performance refers to the identification and resolution of issues or expectations which are impacting the successful delivery of the project. Issues can be related to communications; there will be a large number of sub-contractors on the project site and it will be important that their activities are co-ordinated so that they are not standing idle waiting for a prior

dependent activity to be completed before they can start on their activity.

Issues can be related to human resources. Any conflict between project team members could delay completion. The purpose of issue management is to ensure that all matters requiring resolution, decisions or direction are addressed as soon as possible to avoid negative consequences on project objectives and deliverables.