Now you can create nice spreadsheets with indices, draw tree structures that resemble your tasks, and what does this bring you? First of all, it brings you acceptance as a Project Manager. Project Managers are supposed to create such things. Many customers are not happy when their Project Manager doesn't show up with an Incredible Gantt Chart (preferably printed on A3, double sided).

Financial people want to see the numbers. What does it cost me in the end? They want to know as soon as possible. You can hit them now with the EAC. And, of course, the techniques are ok, they help you structure your mind, your information overload, your life.

Project progress reporting is only a nice job if you take care the expectations of the stakeholders are in line with the current situation. There is no such thing as good news or bad news. If you run over budget, that's bad news. If you stay under budget, that's for most companies also bad news; if you are a supplier and your consultants will do the job in less time then expected, you make less profit then expected, hence pissed stakeholders.

Extra pot of gold

Again, like the entire message of this book, take care of the stakes. It's not just the numbers, it's the consequence of what they represent that causes negative reactions of stakeholders.

With budgets the guy or gal responsible always has to defend changes to a higher level. Consider a system that will be build for a certain business unit A. Parts of the system build for them, will be used later by five other business units. At the start of the project, business unit A has a budget for the complete system. Of course, they run out of budget. Supplier and customer are rolling over the floor: "your fault", "no, it your fault", etc. No one wants to defend the overrun to the higher level in the company.

Suddenly, some one suggests to take the costs for the parts of the system that will be used by other business units also, out of the original budget, and create an additional "pot of gold" for it. After all, it's not fair that this one BU pays all the costs on it's own. Applause. This is something they can defend to higher level. Their budget remains unchanged (with no overrun) and a new budget is created. The numbers remain the same, the fact that more money will be spend than originally thought remains unchanged, but this is fair and no one looses face. Yep, I was there. Was not my suggestion, sadly.

Extra tasks

Imagine, in your project schedule you have planned "testing". Some stakeholders are highly committed to the deadlines for your schedule (they promised probably some one else). Your system will not be ready on this time for testing, at least not the entire system. You can propose to keep the deadline for "testing", and add an additional task after it called "integral testing" or "test it again, Sam". The stakeholders can remain their word (they just said "testing would be finished") and you have your extra time.

I am not claiming this works all the time. I'm just showing that you should be creative in the negotiation on budget and schedule.