How do you respond to inquiries about reducing cost with a project you have well planned as per best practices ?

There is a trade off of time vs cost in the IT industry. Reducing the cost will increase the time of implementation. Simply, its a matter of time and money

Before responding to any cost-cutting inquiry on your project, you have to be sure of certain things:

1. Register cost cutting inquiries as a change request.

2. Calculate your remaining project work (Project Scope) vs. remaining planned budget using EVM.

3. Identify the impact of requested change on project Cost, Schedule, and Scope.

4. Present your findings to Change Control Board.

5. Respond to the inquiries on the decision accordingly.

(I assume your have already designed stakeholders' power/influence grid that guides you to manage stakeholders' requests accordingly).

Please Note: It is the responsibility of CCB to accept/Reject any change request that can affect your project baselines.

 Reducing cost of a project can be done through an efficient management & cost control as follow:

-Increase your bargaining power as a buyer by networking with several suppliers in which you acquire great hints about products' prices in the market.

-Dealing with a primary markets is advantageous if possible

- Buying the large quantity of merchandises from one supplier and get discount

-Buy from the closest possible supplier to save  on freight costs. 

- Financial market screening is important to figure out which financial institutions offer the lowest interest in order to find a compatible and lowest cost of capital for the project.   

-Pay financial duties (if any) as soon as they become due to save on interest costs

- Strategic alliance can help the project reduce costs, this is by acquiring some needed products or raw materials from another companies in a lower prices (this is because they have all needed production resources of a particular merchandises that our project needs and they can buy their raw material in a bulk for cheaper prices than us). In other words if we want to produce these needed merchandise we might waste more resources (money, time).

     Hope the answer reaches your expectation

           Maya Mazloum

            

I fully agree with the answers been added by EXPERTS.............Thanks.

1. Value Engineering should be considered.

2. Reducing time of activities will in most cases, increase costs not reduce them.

3. Generally going towards cost focus means increasing time and reducing quality  

Why do I want to plan a survey?

A survey usually originates when an individual or institution is confronted with a business problem and the existing data are insufficient. At this point, it is important to consider if the required information can be collected by a survey. If you need input from a number of people, must get results quickly, and need specific information to support business decisions, then a survey is the most appropriate technique.

Many studies start with a general hope that something interesting will emerge, and often end in frustration. A careful survey plan will help you focus your project, while guiding your implementation and analysis so the survey research is finished quicker. You can then concentrate on implementing well-supported decisions.

 

Creating Effective Survey Plans

Depending on the scope of your survey, there could be many interrelated issues. Every survey plan should include consideration of the following six areas:

• Survey Value
• Survey Cost
• Defining the Project
• Defining the Audience
• Defining the Project Team
• Project Timeline

Survey Value

The first step in defining your survey project is to understand its scope and importance to your organization and how the information you gather can realistically benefit your work. Survey value depends on three main factors. They are:

• A clear definition of the decisions you need to make
• The relative cost of making an error in those decisions
• The amount of uncertainty the survey will reduce

Survey Cost

Next, estimate the total survey cost. You want to make sure that you don't exceed your budget and realize, only after the survey is complete, that you spent more than what you intended.

A good survey does not come "cheap", although some methods are far more economical than others. Apart from human resources time, three significant costs that you incur are:

• Actual cost of creating the survey instrument
• Cost of inviting your respondents and encouraging them to participate
• Cost for data entry and analysis

Defining the Project

At this point, you need to plan the elements of the survey process and define the project. By setting a measurable objective, you can learn the effectiveness of your survey and it will help you in reinvesting the information you learned for future surveys.

A good example of an Objective Statement would be:

Measure site visitor demographics daily for the next eight weeks to see how effective our online advertising campaign is at drawing our target audience.

Calculate how long the survey will take, including time to invite the respondents, gather data, enter and analyze results. How you conduct your survey affects how long each of these steps will take. For instance, when compared to traditional survey techniques using mail and telephone, Internet surveys provide the ideal solution for information gathering because of their fast turnaround. An entire web survey project can be completed in a couple of days, where printing alone will take a week for the mail survey.

The next thing you identify is how you are going to invite your respondents to take the survey. Several ways that are commonly used are emails, website links, or online advertising. By identifying at least one tangible or intangible benefit that you are offering to your respondents for answering the survey will help you compose an invitation that helps respondents to click through. A tangible benefit could be in the form of money or a gift; whereas an intangible benefit is the chance to voice opinions or contribute to research they view as valuable.

Defining the Audience

Who is going to respond to your survey? Your target audience could include your customers, prospects, employees, or members. A survey panel is mainly dependent on your objective since it will help you identify your target audience.

Next, focus on the sample size, or number of respondents you would need for your analysis to be valid and accurate. Based on the population about which you are drawing conclusions, the greater the level of accuracy desired and the more certain you would like to be about the inferences to be made from the sample to the entire population, the larger the number of respondents must be.

Bear in mind that all the people who you invite might not respond to the survey. Hence you also need to estimate the percentage of those invited whom you want to respond. With the mail-based surveys the response rate is traditionally low, hovering in the 2 to 3 percent range. Telephone surveys allow for retries when the contact isn't available, so can yield results at the ten percent level. Most web-based surveys however are announced with an e-mail message that contains a link to the survey page. This format allows users to respond at their convenience and results in significantly higher response rates.

Defining the Project Team

You need to identify the internal resources you may need to complete this survey process. This is dependent on your company and also on the kind of survey you are conducting. A few internal resources you might need are:

Human Resources: Necessary for employee satisfaction surveys IT: Customized interactivity or additional templates Market Research: Data analysis and reporting

Defining the Project Timeline

What are the tasks and is there a specific order in which they need to be completed? Defining a project timeline will help list the entire set of tasks that are to be conducted for the survey and assign them to specific people in your company. By setting a timeline that includes each of these tasks, you can keep track of their commencement and end, and maintain control over the survey process. In the Survey Development Worksheet, we have identified a set of tasks associated with most survey projects and are presented to give you a starting point for developing your own timeline in creating an effective survey plan.

Conclusion

We have reviewed why you need to create a plan and the benefits that you can get by planning your survey. We have looked at the activities that are involved in planning a survey which include the survey value, the survey cost, defining the project, defining the audience, defining the project team and defining the project timeline.

It is important for you to create a survey plan since it will guide, direct, and coordinate the tasks required to initiate and complete your survey successfully. Although each project is unique, using a standardized planning tool will help you get the results you want from every research project.

Thanks for the invitation,

 

Agree with expert answers.

Agree with the expert answers here

I would say there are two approaches here depending on size and complexity of project:-

 

1. For smaller or ad-hoc projects:-
   • Who is making the request? Are they senior or junior? Are they a key stakeholder or an external agent?
   • What is the context of the request? Is it a general inquiry, is it inquisitive, formal, informal, are there any project concerns that might have prompted this? Are there external concerns that prompted this?
   • Once you understand who and context you will be more able to tailor your response and give the appropriate answer. Stick to the facts and check first the the person you are telling has the right to know.
2. For larger projects you are managing with a framework
   • Follow the guideline's best practice.

Hope this helps.

 

Best Regards,Matthew

 

It could be a change and changes always happen to our project, and for such a this changes we need to have the acceptance of Change control board.

 I agree with Mr. Matthew.

Why is the question arising?

Is the project overrunning the planned cost or is it a general demand?

If the project is overrunning the cost, you need to identify the reasons and inform the management for a tighter control. If it is a general inquiry the best way is to follow the plan properly with planned resources only which would keep costs in control. If there is a possibility of fast tracking (reducing an activity's duration by increasing resources) which would reduce overall project's duration, it would reduce overall project costs.