An Analysis to Improve Interim Final Project Cost Predictions

When managing a project, a project manager is often faced with the decision to act if a project appears to be over budget. While this decision seems straightforward, for some projects this can be a costly decision that causes delays and missed deadlines or spending even more resources on analyzing individual expenses.

Currently, project management research has assumed that the project manager knows the correlation between the completed work and work remaining deterministically or it assumes that a general gaussian distribution holds and proceeds with cost projecting from there.

This research challenges this assumption by forcing varying correlation distribution curves into the project cost at completion calculation when analyzing for the cost of remaining work after some work has been performed.

This research adds to the project management knowledge by specifically attempting to account for different cost estimating sources of error and showing that the current assumptions with respect to the sufficiency of correlating the remaining cost with the completed costs is lacking.