Vehicle maintenance facility project report - Cost and Quality Management Plans

Vehicle maintenance facility project represent a complex construction project with a lot of activities that need to be performed and involvement of a variety of different resources with specific skills. Due to the nature of activities, a lot of dependencies exist that are not only between the activities within the same group (decomposition level), but also with activities from another group. A good example of this is the activity under ID101 (Lay concrete pads for transformers and AC equipment) which is under the higher level of activity Final Site Work, and it is dependent on the activity with ID43 (Erect brick Veneer – Office Area) that is a part of Structure and Envelope activities group. Furthermore, dependency types between activities are varying (e.g. from default Finish to Start up to Start to Start with some delay in a few days). Considering complexity of project, variety of resources that are needed and dependencies, a proper cost estimation must be conducted carefully in order to estimate as closely as possible cost of activities, cost of resources, their allocation to specific activities and other elements that are required for the Cost Management Plan and Quality Management Plan. Cost management plan will be used further for the project budget proposal.

Cost Management Plan

1. Cost estimation approach/tool
There are a lot of uncertainties and factors that could be very hard to predict and are related to the project schedule, scope, and resources. At the beginning, project managers usually don’t know a lot about the project and don’t have a clear picture. As the project progresses through time, project managers are having a much clearer picture about all aspects (activities, resource allocation, cost, risks, other issues and etc.) This is very well presented through the cone of uncertainty (Figure 1).

Nevertheless, it is not always possible to plan later and project managers, due to the nature of the project, don't have that luxury to do agile planning. For some projects, such as this one regarding the construction of Vehicle maintenance facility, planning should be done at the beginning, with the focus on defining the cost baseline and estimation of the project budget.

First step in preparing a Cost Management Plan for the Vehicle maintenance facility construction project, is to choose a proper cost estimation tool. After careful consideration of the activities on the project, and resources that are available, a suitable would be to use the bottom-up estimation technique and to start estimation from the lower level and roll up to higher level. This means that the cost of resources should be established first. Next, each of the activities should be closely examined and determined what is the duration, what are the resources that are required for that activity and what are the fixed costs (e.g. usage of machineries, construction material). Then, other components of the cost management planning should be determined and finally, the cost management plan should comprise all the previously explained elements and assumptions.

2. Cost of resources
Resources that are required for this project are divided into two groups - management and operations. This is done in order to more easily divide planning of efforts and budget required for the activities, as well as to perform easier resource allocation and to have clear responsibilities. Resources under the management
group should be responsible for

1. How is the project progressing in terms of cost and schedule?...