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1. Defining the Cost Baseline

• Transfer - are there any contract, people, assets... to transfer during the project?
  
• Hardware - hardware initial investment and maintenance costs
  
• External - consulting and third party support
  
• Software - software licenses and maintenance costs
  
• People - internal workload spent on the project
  
• Accomodation - travel costs.
  

• For the people category, you will of course use your project schedule to determine the associated costs. Once you have listed all activities and dependancies, and assigned each activity to a resource, you can calculate the overall resource costs for the project. To determine the Cost Baseline, you should additionnally breakdown this resource costs by work period (we recommend to use the week as the standard work period).

• For the Hardware, Software, External and Transfer categories, you will also use your project schedule to determine during which work periods these costs will be incurred.
• For the Accomodation category, we suggest you to estimate the total number of travel days needed for the project, and streamline them all over the project lifecycle. You may increase the number of travel days during given project phases, like the planning or the execution phase, depending of the specificity of your project.

2. Measuring project progress

• Work units already consumed (in can be man days for the People part, but also monetary values for Hardware or Transfer parts) (1)
  
• Completion rate in %. This is of course the most complex to evaluate, especially for the activities. The PMI suggests differents methods concerning this completion rate. Among the commonly used methods, we suggest to chose between the 0-100 method (activity is either non started, or fully completed) or the 0-50-100 method (activity is 50% completed whenever it's started, and 100% when completed).
  
• These two elements will enable you to compute the 'Estimate at Completion' for the related activity. If an activity was budgeted 10 k€, that 4 k€ have already been spent and that the activity is 50% complete, the EAC for this activity is 4/50% = 8 k€ (2)
  

• The baseline cost vs. the revised cost (if you experienced a rebaselining during your project, it's interesting to keep the initial budget curve)
• The earned value. This last curve shows the value of the work actually done, which is different for the costs actually incurred: you may have spent more time on an activity go get a result which has a lower end value.
  

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Excel Template - Project Cost Baseline