Next steps

- Congratulations for finishing this course. I hope it's given you an appreciation for the importance of project budget management and how it's intertwined with other standard project management processes. With a bit of diligence and strategic times throughout your project, you can not only plan and manage your project budget throughout your project lifecycle, you can apply foresight that can alert you to potential project issues. Budget management is critical for controlling your project and ensuring that you deliver the value your sponsor and key stakeholders need.

Apply the techniques I've discussed and you'll be well on your way to fully understanding and being able to share valuable project budget information on this important aspect of project management. Here are my recommended next steps for learning more about project budget management. First, expand your knowledge on earned value management. I only touched the surface of this technique during this course. With the earned value approach, a dollar value is assigned to all tasks and your project status is reflected in financial terms.

Both from a budget and a schedule standpoint. Second, you can learn to successfully apply earned value on your project. The United States Department of Defense has published a comprehensive guide on earned value management. It's entitled the DoD Earned Value Management Implementation Guide. Also, the Project Management Institute or PMI has a practice standard for earned value management. Third, better budgets come from better estimation.

PMI has produced a practice standard on project estimation. There are solid techniques for improving your estimating in that standard. Lastly, I frequently reference work breakdown structures in this course. PMI has a practice standard for work breakdown structures you may want to review. All of these standards are applicable across industries and will expand upon some of the concepts I introduced in this course. Use them to expand your options when managing a project.

I am sure they will give you many options to shine amongst your project management peers.