Performing Cost Control in Construction

Mohamed Ammar is a construction manager in Cairo, Egypt.

More than two years ago, I was selected by my company board as the new project controlling department manager. The company had suffered unsuccessful trials with other field professionals (due to many reasons that are beyond the scope of this article), whose roles were nothing more than documenting and presenting the status of individual projects.

I had 10 years of project management experience in my career, but it was what I learned during my project management studies that truly helped me. 

Defining the job description
I met with my team to discuss the job description, set roles and define achievable goals. We agreed that our mission was to upgrade the role and value of our department; determine the areas that impact the company’s financial situation and cash flows; and provide a means to reduce or eliminate such impacts. Our scope in cost control was to cover…

  • Cost control sheets creation
  • Purchase orders analysis
  • Monthly reports
  • Cost data entry
  • Cost forecasting

…for each project, in addition to monthly dashboards and quarterly reports.

After that, we started preparing a summarized report showing the status of all the running projects in the company from the data that was already available. We used monthly status reports from the finance department as a skeleton for our report, mixed with scheduling baselines and updates …

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Published at Wed, 25 Sep 2019 04:00:00 +0000