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PEI PMA Grade 3 study materials
PEI PMA Grade 3 study resources

PEI PMA Grade 3: Scope, schedule and cost planning and control

PEI PMA Grade 3 · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Scope, schedule and cost planning and control

Scope

Requirements are elicited, analysed, documented and traced. The scope baseline is the scope statement plus the WBS plus the WBS dictionary. Work not in the WBS is out of scope. Changes go through integrated change control; scope creep is uncontrolled addition. Validate scope means formal acceptance of deliverables; control scope means monitoring status and managing changes.

Schedule

Define activities from the WBS, sequence them with dependencies, estimate durations and resources, then develop the schedule. The critical path is the longest path through the network and determines the minimum project duration; critical activities have zero or negative total float. Crashing adds resources and usually cost and risk; fast tracking overlaps phases and increases rework risk. Resource levelling may extend duration; smoothing within available float may not.

Cost and EVM

Cost baseline is the approved budget excluding management reserve. Contingency reserve covers identified risks; management reserve covers unknown-unknowns and sits above the baseline. Earned value uses PV, EV and AC: CV = EV − AC, SV = EV − PV, CPI = EV / AC, SPI = EV / PV; EAC = BAC / CPI when current performance continues; ETC = EAC − AC; VAC = BAC − EAC. SPI on the critical path is more decision-relevant than overall SPI.

Worked example

BAC = 500,000; EV = 200,000; AC = 250,000; PV = 220,000 at month 4. CPI = 0.80, SPI = 0.91. CV = −50,000, SV = −20,000. If performance continues, EAC = 500,000 / 0.80 = 625,000; VAC = −125,000. The PM should investigate cost drivers first because CPI 0.80 is worse than SPI 0.91, and check whether critical-path activities are slipping.

Traps

  • Assigning percent complete by elapsed time instead of objective deliverable maturity.
  • Treating management reserve as available to the PM without approval.
  • Using SPI near 1.0 as reassurance when critical-path work is late.
  • Gold-plating to please a client; it is unapproved scope.
  • Confusing a bottom-up budget estimate with a rough order of magnitude.