Joan & Kaylee seem to be generally pleased with how your Project Plan is starting to come together.

Lee, Tube Pro's CFO, is, however, a little concerned with the cost. "How do you know you're going to be able to pull this off with the budget Joan has allocated?", he asked you the other day. He continued: "You've got all of these great ideas of bringing people together, trying to build us back into more of a team, and bring in some high-caliber guest speakers. Never mind making sure we're going to be well fed. Do you have any idea what putting an event like this is going to cost?"

To help Lee know that you've thought through the costs, you'll need to estimate the costs, and then put together a budget. This will not only help Lee, but Joan too. And, it will provide a baseline for you to monitor and control your project costs once you get out of the Planning phase and into Execution.

For items on your WBS, come up with a reasonable cost for that line item. Then, overlay that with your Gantt Chart to capture your weekly spend on the project. You can use the images from this week's class as patterns to follow as you update and add this element to your existing documents. Or, you might decide to do this in a new document, copying the information from your other sources.

You'll be able to use that to monitor and control your spend, and provide weekly status report updates to Joan, Lee, Kaylee, and others who might be interested.