Top 5 Skills of a Cost Controller

have you ever been in a project that finished very over-budget and nobody could explain exactly why have you ever seen a cost report in a project that only showed the budget versus expenditures I've ever published or seen a cost report and has no clue what those cost metrics were if your answer is yes to any of those questions either I didn't have any cost controller on your team or your cost controller lacked one of the five essential skills that any cost controller must have and every month my name is shir egg or Bailey I'm the founder and director of project control Academy where we help you master your skills and knowledge we project controls in this training I'm going to show you the five skills that you need to have as a cost controller if you are someone already as working in a project at the cost controller or someone completing you to project controls but I love this training you will have a good understanding of the top five official skills that you need to possess or improve upon as a cost controller and when it comes to the skills or the cost controller there are many skills that you can list in fact if you check a C's International which AC stands for American Association of advancement in cost engineering they have several practice standards and one of those practice standard is called the requires knowledge and skills as a cost engineer so if you check that guide and document you will be amazed at the number of knowledge areas that are listed for a cost controller in this training my focus is only on the top five essential skills that I believe are the must for a cost controller and this is basically based on my own her use as a cost control during projects that during the course of my caring project controls so are you ready to know what those five skills are before revealing you you those there are five skills of a cost controller let's be on the same ground when it comes to cost control let's have the same understanding of cost control so that you know what you're talking about so the role of the cost controller in a project is a cost controller is responsible for planning developing executing and forecasting the cost of a project so that's basically what the cost controller the cost controller controlling the cost of a project so they are really mainly responsible for managing and developing the cost of the project and make sure that there is minimum deviation from the budget and if there is and come up with a recovery plan to bring the project back on budget so that's basically what the cost controller does in a project now going back to the five skills the first skill that a cost controller need to have is they need to have the knowledge of total cost management and cost control they need to know they need to have a fundamental understanding of cost control they need to know the terminologies and everything and this is fundamental skill that every cost controller need to have for example you need to know about cost accounting cost classes cost types and cost the developments change management and the name and the list basically goes on and on so you need to really have a good understanding on not only the cost management terminologies but also understanding of the process the flow of information and how basically that for cost control function works in a project if you are someone new in cost control who is or someone who is interested to move into cost-control the recommended practices or resources that I would like to say about that is these two resources from anything International Association of advancement in cost engineering they have very good comprehensive resources when it comes to cost management and especially I like these two practices one is skills and knowledge of cost engineering they have this is a very comprehensive guide in cost engineering that you know I recommend you to go through that and read that even if you are not going through a fee specifications I still recommend you to go through that book and make yourself familiar with all the terms all the fundamental understanding fundamental knowledge of cost management and really have that ground in place another one is total cost management framework you can find that resources by checking a fee website which is here there dot a fee i.org or you can also purchase those from amazon.com and whatever it is I recommend you to find those resources get them and read them and go through them and apply them in your projects and increase your knowledge in cost management okay the second skill that every cost controller need to have is knowing how to allocate the budget and establish a cost baseline in fact this is one of the first tasks that every cost controller need to do in every project but you will be amazed at you know the simple fact that many cost controller is really don't do a good job at let me just be more clear on what this skill is all about it's about allocating the budget so when a cost controller is given a project budget one of their tasks is to allocate the budget to different disciplines basically break that down coming up with the right budget for each of those team members the group of teams basically the disciplines involved in the project coming up with a resource plan and basically plan out the expenditure of the project how they're going to spend that budget and also establish a cost baseline coming up with a baseline basis that they're going to measure their cost against because when they go through the performance of the project this is one of the key inputs for understanding how they are performing against that basis so in project controlling cost control in any of project control areas one of the first key thing that you need to deliver is the plan if the baseline so the same thing here with the cost controller they need to have a baseline in place so that they can measure the deviations against that baseline in the project execution and again that make sense that's a very essential skills that every cost controller must have but during the course of my career I have seen many people not following that rule for example let me give you an example here about the allocation of the budget I have seen a project where that task was not done properly all they had was just one liner for the entire project so everybody was charging their time against that project number and there was no budget allocation whatsoever so it was just one line one budget number for the entire project and that project was a neat sized project it was not a small project and six months the true the execution of the project client felt something is not right the expenditures were going to be very high and the client didn't really know what's going on so they went back to the project control team of the contractor that the contractor that they hired and they asked accurate cost reports and accurate forecasting of the cost and that was a big problem because they had no budget allocation whatsoever from the beginning of the project everybody was charging against one budget line item and there was no means of really measuring the performance of what they were doing when it comes to cost so many people I remember in that project tree for project control lead during the involving that project just to fix that issue but that was a whole disaster how he can fix an issue that could have been done earlier in the project at the beginning of the project by doing the right allocation of the budget nothing can be fixed in the middle of the project that something goes like that so and the person who was working on that project was really an intermediate cost controller so that person was already in the cost control field for a while but because client didn't have specific requirements for the cost report he went the easy route and just come up with a wall liner and then that caused him a lot of problems later on so really you need to be able to allocate the budget properly in the project at the beginning another example that goes about establishing the budget and baseline is my personal experience with one of the subcontractors that we were managing in a project every project reports that they were issuing to us showed a different budget and it's okay as long as you have it you know you specify what is my original budget is very changes and that's my client but no I'm talking about their baseline budget the original budget kept changing in every port and it was so confusing to follow the reports and understand really their performance and it came to cost so I have seen that many times in the projects and many people as cost controllers really lack that essential skill so if this is something that you don't know make sure that you get involved in projects from the beginning and learn how to properly allocate the budget and really establishing a project cost baseline so that was the second skill of the cost controller let's move on to the third one the third skill of a cost controller is knowing and value in and out in value management you know is a very powerful tool if you can implement it properly projects and you might be evolving projects that really don't need and value I mean it's not a requirement to implement and value so if you're a cost controller still I highly encourage you to learn and value no matter if the organization you're working at I know anything about anybody or have the priority of implementing and valuing their projects or not this is your responsibility to learn more about Aaron value there is an is as I said it's a very powerful tool in measuring the performance especially on cost and schedule and forecasting if you can implement Aaron value properly in projects you can have more accurate forecasting and as compared to any other methods so if this is a skill that you haven't invested time and energy on I highly encourage you to go ahead and learn that skill and learn that management area and try to apply it in at least a project and see the impact that it creates and by the way most people get confused when it comes to end value they think that it's just a number of metrics and if they can just go and memorize those those metrics they know Aaron back know in order to know Aaron value and Tim's meant it you need to have it you know from the planning to the execution in projects properly and you need to know it in and out you need to by looking at a ere Value Report in front of you need to understand really what's causing the issues and what the forecast is we need to be able to analyze the report and the list goes on and on you need to know and value in and out if your cost controller in my opinion so if this is something that you need to improve upon I have two good resources for you there are two online training programs that are very comprehensive when it comes to Aaron Valley management and you can check them at your own pace one is essentials of Aaron value management and another is mastering and that imagine for project success which is more advanced level in my training very to walk stitch through a real project from the beginning to end and you increment and and on that project so it's more practical application of air values this one gives you the foundation so if this is something you are looking for in your advancement to advance your carrier in cost control these two trainings I highly recommend you can check project control training.com /vm to know more about these trainings and start learning and value okay that's ours I believe the church skills the fourth skill are the cost controller as we already mentioned about is someone who can analyze the cost report and communicate the result of the cost report properly to the team members I have seen many cost controllers who do a very good job in putting together the data generate fancy reports but they cannot communicate the results properly to the team members you know some of those cost reports might be complex and the team members might have no clue what the issue might be they cannot really interpret a cost report this is your responsibility as a cost controller to effectively communicate the cost results to the project team members and make them aware of any budget issues or any cost related issues that they are facing and this is really what I have seen many cost controller don't take the time to do don't take the time to educate that team or properly communicate the result of their cost report editing and some of the cost controller just issue a report send it out to the team and they also have no clue what's going on they don't take their time to analyze the report and how many times you have seen that and you are just busy doing something putting together their report to just meet that deadline you don't have a time to analyze it or you don't know how to analyze the report so this is really a key skill for a cost controller because you are dealing with a lot of data on numbers you need to be able to analyze the cost report and effectively communicate that to the project team members okay the last skill of the cost controller is having proficiency in Microsoft Excel or a cost control tool or software that your organization is using there is an I ports Microsoft Excel as a primary skill for you to know and master it is because no matter what kind of project control system or software you are using most probably you're using that information and generate some reports or graphs out of it in Excel and you're working with a large number of data on numbers so Excel is a very good tool that you need to master and you will see many cost controllers using Excel as their primary tool some companies even don't have any cost control software so their own main tool is Microsoft Excel so you have to make sure that you're really proficient in Microsoft Excel know that in and out know all the formulas know how to do graphing and everything else and if you are basic in a Microsoft Excel make sure that you take the time to learn more about that tool and master that tool in your work and either projects that you're involved so these are basically defies the key essential skills that I have seen for cost controllers and I recommend you to master those again let me wrap those up the first skill is the knowledge in total cost management and concepts and terminologies you need to have a good foundation you need to educate yourself and keep learning on cost management the second skills is know how to allocate the budget and stablish a cost baseline the third skill is annoying and value management in and out the fourth skills is analyzing the reports and effectively communicating their reports and results to the project team and finally knowing Microsoft Excel very good and know how to apply that tool in your projects so these are the four as essential skills that we need to master as a cost controller in projects if you'd like to learn more on how to succeed as a cost control over how to succeed at the project controller make sure that you check out this course a project control success roadmap training you can check that out at project control training comm and learn more about how we can succeed as a project controller and as a cost controller as well so if you have any question about this training make sure that you post your questions or comments down below I will make sure that I will respond to as many questions as I can and if you like this training if you thought it's beneficial make sure that you share it with other people and don't forget to use the like button until the next episode of project control mastery training do your best and everything that you do master those five skills or the cost controller and make a difference in your projects my friend [Music]

Channel: Project Control Academy

Views: 52,790

Rating: 4.8170877 out of 5

Keywords: Cost Control, skills of a cost controller, cost engineer, project controls, project control training, project control academy, cost controller, shohreh ghorbani, project controls training, cost management, project management, project cost management, cost control management, cost control in project management, cost controller interview, cost engineering training, project controls 101, project controls video, cost controller job description, cost controller course

Id: spzd9N_5fIs

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2017