Budget management for a complex project is a serious endeavor – one that can often mean the difference between failure and success. Managing a budget means understanding the scope of work as well as understanding the proposed timeline and scheduling. It means anticipating hurdles along the way. It means being strategic and flexible in the way your overcome those hurdles. It’s fair to say, at its core, that proper budget management relies on the ability to communicate, collaborate and make the right choices based on the best, most up-to-date information.
We recently hosted a webinar focusing on 3 Workflows to Improve Budget Management. Using the information and insight from the webinar, we put together a few tips on how to take full control of your budget, manage changes in scope and drastically improve your overall outcome. All you need to do is ask yourself a few questions:
Is the current model data comprehensive, up-to-date and organized?
As a project develops, maintaining model data that reflects that progression can be a challenge. Applying Level of Development (LOD) to your project enables a manager to document changes at every level as they happen. As a result, there is more reliable data added to the model and the project teams have a more collaborative approach to communicating changes..
Are you prepared to answer questions in real time and make changes if requested?
Sometimes owners have changes. Sometimes they just want to know what is going on right now, in detail. Design Trending is the answer. Design Trending paints a picture of the project’s progress so that you can gain insight on trends and influencers. Opportunities for improvement can be identified and evaluated early and often. Using Design Trending to optimize the ability to report current status, make changes and tackle issues before they happen leads to a better outcome and a satisfied customer.
Will you be able to look back on this project and know the influence and impact of every change?
Establishing a clear, structured Value Engineering (VE) process is the first step in ensuring minimal headaches in the future. With this workflow, project teams can collaborate visually and quantitatively as individual options are tagged to elements of the scope to accurately track related costs. Using this method creates a clear audit trail between Assemble, the design model and the external reports and contracts. VE essentially helps every team member see what is coming in and going out and the changes that should occur in response to each action.
If managing your complex budget seems like an exercise in trying to predict the future, remember it is the planning and documentation of the past that enables the ability to be accurate, flexible and at-ease in the present. At Assemble, we can help you use these workflows to optimize your budget management practices to produce the best possible outcomes. For more information on this topic, view our webinar here or contact us directly.
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