Delivering the Work: Projects, Tasks, Time and Cost

McKinsey's research on large projects puts average cost overruns in the region of 28 to 33 percent. Overruns of that size are not usually one catastrophe — they are a hundred small facts that nobody could see in time.

The plan is a copy, taken deliberately

When a work order is taken up for execution, QuantX Ops copies the estimate into a plan. From then on the plan is the live tree and the estimate stays as the baseline you priced against. Re-planning does not rewrite history, and "we are over because the scope changed" becomes a claim you can show rather than assert.

Cost sits on the leaves

Budget and hours belong on the tasks that do the work, not on the sections that contain them — a parent's figure is the sum of its children. This sounds pedantic until you try to measure progress: a section carrying its own cost double-counts, and the earned-value figures quietly become nonsense.

Three sources of cost, one total

Source	How it arrives
Labour	Time booked against tasks, priced at the rate frozen when the person joined the project
Material	Stock issued from stores, at moving-average cost
Expenses	Approved claims and supplier bills tagged to the job

The labour rate is frozen on assignment deliberately: a pay rise in March should not retrospectively change what January's work cost.

Schedule and progress

Tasks carry dependencies, so the critical path is computed rather than guessed. Progress against the baseline gives you schedule and cost performance — and, more usefully than any index, a list of the specific tasks that are late.