Of the three key project success determiners (budget, schedule, and customer satisfaction), the project budget can often be the most difficult one to achieve success on. Sure, it seems like it should be easy, but if something goes awry and you need extra bodies on the project to stay on track, your schedule may stay unscathed while your project budget spirals out of control due to the extra, expensive project resource charges. 
 First off, I fully believe that it is critical that the project budget be managed closely and regularly throughout the project engagement. With weekly oversight, you can hopefully avoid the need to take any corrective budget actions as described in this article. Basically – stick to these two principles: 
 
Review and reforecast often. By reviewing the project budget and reforecasting it weekly – then it will never get too far out of hand barring, of course, a catastrophic event. And if it never gets too far out of hand the corrective action you need to take will be small and manageable. 
 
When 10% is better than 50%. You can recover from a 10% budget overage that you might experience if you’re managing the project budget closely like I’ve mentioned so far. However, if you’re not – you can easily get into a situation from which there is no budget recovery. No amount of corrective action will fix it.  

For the full article, go here...