Project management: how to manage project costs? PMP® prep

Earned value management measures project performance by comparing the budgeted value of work actually completed with the value planned to be complete by now and with the cost actually incurred, producing variances and indices that forecast the final cost and date.

Agile is a family of delivery approaches that build a product in short iterations, each producing something usable, so that plans are corrected by what was learned rather than defended against it.

Scrum is a lightweight framework for delivering complex work in fixed-length iterations called sprints, with three accountabilities, five events and three artefacts, defined in a short public guide.

A day rate sells a bounded unit of a supplier's working time rather than a finished result, so the client rather than the supplier carries the risk that the job turns out bigger than it looked.

A client brief is the short written statement of what a piece of work has to achieve, for whom, and under which fixed constraints, agreed before either side commits to a solution.

A statement of work is the document that commits one bounded piece of work to paper: what gets built, on which assumptions, to what deadline, for what money, and what sits outside it.