What this is for.
Twenty years of project controls taught me a few things I wasn't willing to compromise on. They're all in here.
The president of my company came into my office one day. He was shrewd, cunning, and very successful. I asked him what the number one thing he'd learned about being successful was.
He said: "Use other people's money."
I never had the fortune to figure out a project of my own. So I built a system to help the people who do have a project use other people's money — and to show those people, honestly and continuously, exactly what happened to it.
As much as I want this to be successful, I hope it is more useful than it is successful.
The Project Cost System combines all aspects of project cost control into a single data model. That's what makes consistent, instant reporting to every stakeholder possible with minimal effort.
What I'm trying to do.
- Provide real value. Help clients manage the three things that actually sink projects: cash, change, and communication.
- Maximize ease of use. A cost system nobody wants to open is a cost system nobody updates.
- Be there for the small ones. Startups and small businesses running on Excel deserve a real cost system — and shouldn't be priced out of legitimate revenue opportunities. The prestige pricing of other systems is a problem, not a signal of quality.
- Be there for altruistic projects. A completely safe, auditable system so investors and donors can see the whole cost picture at any moment and know their money is being administered properly.
- Be completely auditable within a project. Not "mostly." Completely.
- Provide complete security over client data. Non-negotiable.
- Make customers more efficient, more profitable, more successful — with less effort. That takes real customer focus at setup. Getting the system configured right is my job, not homework I hand you.
The doctrine the software actually enforces.
If you've run cost, none of this will surprise you. That's the point — most systems make you fight them on these.
- Budget is handed down. The cost professional may help create it and be the steward of it — but it is approved from above. The system treats it that way.
- The cost professional owns Work In Place, Forecast To-Go, and Forecast. Reporting work in place, forecast to-go, and forecast in relation to the project is their job, and the system gives it to them.
- The period cycle must be maintained. Everything answers to the clock.
- Forecast, Forecast To-Go, and Work In Place are managed separately — but the relationship holds. Update any of them in any direction as information arrives; the system flags what still needs data and always shows you the freshest number. Period close is where they get resolved. Forecast = Work In Place + Forecast To-Go, per control account, every time.
- Budgets cannot make WIP. Progress is earned, never assumed from a budget line.
- When it was entered is not when it happened. The period a WIP or Forecast To-Go row was created is a different fact from the period it was earned or planned. Reconciling against accounting? Go by period created. Reporting the WIP profile? Go by period earned — past periods get updated as better information arrives, and the curve gets more accurate, not more frozen.
- PCS is not the originating system of record. Req numbers, contract numbers, GR numbers, invoice numbers — those are born in your business systems. PCS consumes them for comparison and reporting; it does not pretend to run your approval workflows. If you don't have a requisition, goods-receipt, or invoice-approval process, you can run it here — it just won't be certified for that purpose.
- Every number is a sum of append-only log rows. Summed once, at one grain, from one place. Nothing is overwritten. A correction is a new row that walks the number back to the truth, and the history survives.
What would make it "the best"?
The honest answer is that I'm still writing that list, and I'd rather write it with the first few clients than guess at it alone. What I'm sure of: it has to be completely auditable, it has to be secure, and it has to give people insight that makes their next decision better.
If any of this sounds like the system you wish you had, tell me what's missing.
Having a unified cost system where all the different stakeholders can see the same picture, from their own perspective, QC'ing it in their own way — that will improve project success. — The thesis