Cost And Quality Management Plans: A Guide To Developing Effective Cost And Quality Management Plans

Subject Learning Outcomes

The budget of the project is estimated as follows.

It has been found from the case study that the total material and plant costs as $33600.

Total Budget

From the calculations and estimation, the total budget of the project is found to be $ (274800+33600) = $308,400.

During the estimation of the costs of the project, several techniques have been used. For calculating the human resource costs in the project, bottom up estimation technique has been used with the assist of Microsoft Project Software (Heldman, 2018). In this estimation process, an activity timeline has been created based on the dependencies and durations of each individual task. After the completion of the timeline, human resources were added to each of the tasks (Harrison & Lock, 2017). In this project, there were two main human resources – labourers and tradesmen. In each of the tasks, different numbers of labourers and tradesmen are required. The numbers are denoted by a percentage e.g. in the task where 6 labourers are required, it is denoted by “labourers [600%]”. After allocation, the resource costs were set i.e. for labourers, the cost rate was $30 per hour and for tradesmen, the rate was $45 per hour. After setting these values, Microsoft Project, automatically calculates the expenditure in each activity as well as the total expenditure for the human resources.

For calculating the material costs, the unit rates of materials were determined for each of the tasks (Tonchia, 2018). The total material cost was calculated by multiplying the unit rate and the number of weeks they were being used in the project.

In addition to the development of the budget, it is also important to develop suitable cost management plan so that the project does not deviate from the determined resource usage and cost during execution (Wysocki, 2014). During the project, it should be ensured that right amount of human resources are deployed to work the specified number of days and the working hours (10 hours per day and 50 hours a week). Each work must be completed within the specified end date so that the next work starts at the right time.

Quality Planning

Quality planning is defined as the formulation of a set of guidelines that define the required quality standard of the project. The quality standards depend on the type and nature of the project and vary widely. Again, just setting the quality standards is not sufficient for a project. It is also required to develop a suitable plan for implementation and monitoring of the quality management plan. The plan should include the steps that are required to meet the quality standards and suitable monitoring plan to ensure the suitable quality standards are being met during the project.

Budget of the Project

Like other projects, this project must also meet certain quality standards. These quality standards are to be set before the project work is started. In this particular project, the required quality standards include the following aspects.

Material Quality – Since this project involves the construction of a bungalow, a large amount of construction materials are utilized through the project (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). It is important that the materials are of the highest quality as low quality materials can cause problems like unfinished building, destruction of the building under moderate forces like strong winds or pressure and others.

Design Quality – In addition to the materials, it is also important to emphasize on the quality of design of the bungalow (Pheng, 2018). Poor quality designs often lead to severe complications during construction and may also cause accidents in the near future due to falling off of building parts and walls.

Quality of Work – Even though the material and design qualities are high, it is also important to provide high quality of work in the project so as to utilize the materials to develop the bungalow based on the actual design provided. For providing the best quality work, the workers are provided with sufficient amount of time (working 10 hours a day, 5 days a week). Poor quality of work will be penalized if identified during the course of the project or during the post project review.

Quality assurance is defined as the set of actions and metrics that are used to determine whether the quality standards of the project met. In this project, as discussed already, there are three main quality aspects – material, design and work. In order to assure the standard quality of the materials, reliable vendors are to be chosen who have good background of supply of good quality materials at the best possible price (Low & Ong, 2014). There are also several laboratory tests available to check the overall quality of the materials. For design quality, design engineer with established professional background must be selected. For the work quality, only skilled labour with previous work experiences in similar projects will have to chosen and recruited.

In addition to implementation and assurance of project quality, it is important to deploy quality control measures in order to ensure the project does not deviate from its quality standards. Penalties can be imposed for both vendors and workers in case they deliver poor quality materials or work (Nicholas & Steyn, 2017). Furthermore, in order to ensure the design of the bungalow is not poor, a pre-determined design of the building will be provided such that the engineer can work on it and develop a final design accordingly.

It is the duty of the project manager to emphasize and monitor on the quality of the project outcome although in some cases, a specialist quality control manager is recruited to monitor the quality of the project. Similarly, in this project, a specialist quality control manager will be appointed in order to supervise the quality of the project. The quality control manager will have a number of duties that include the following:

• Check the quality of materials purchased for setting up the bungalow
• Consult with the technical specialist to ensure the design of the bungalow is up to the required quality
• Supervise the project work to ensure the quality of the project work is as per the requirements

References

Harrison, F., & Lock, D. (2017). Advanced project management: a structured approach. Routledge.

Heldman, K. (2018). PMP: project management professional exam study guide. John Wiley & Sons.

Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Low, S. P., & Ong, J. (2014). Project Quality Management. Critical success factors for.

Nicholas, J. M., & Steyn, H. (2017). Project management for engineering, business and technology. Routledge.

Pheng, L. S. (2018). Project Quality Management. In Project Management for the Built Environment (pp. 113-125). Springer, Singapore.

Tonchia, S. (2018). Project Cost Management and Finance. In Industrial Project Management (pp. 153-170). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Wysocki, R. K. (2014). Effective project management: traditional, agile, extreme. John Wiley & Sons.