
Now you are ready to build your budget plan. That way, you know the assumptions made when you were coming up with the numbers.

It’s important to keep all of your supporting estimate information. Once you apply all the tools in this process, you will arrive at an estimate for how much your project will cost.

It is the amount of money it takes to do the project right. Cost of quality is just a way of tracking the cost of those activities. Since it’s cheaper to find bugs earlier in the project than later, there are always quality costs associated with everything your project produces.

This estimate will become more refined as time goes on and you learn more about the project. When you make an estimate early in the project without knowing much about it, that estimate is called a rough order-of-magnitude estimate (or a ballpark estimate). Often, when you come into a project, there is already an expectation of how much it will cost or how much time it will take. It is now possible to track the project according to that budget while the work is ongoing. Once this is compiled, you add up the cost estimates into a budget plan. It is important to come up with detailed estimates for all the project costs. But no matter whether your project is big or small, and no matter how many resources and activities are in it, the process for figuring out the bottom line is always the same. That’s why no project plan is complete until you come up with a budget. If you had a bigger budget, you could probably get more people to do your project more quickly and deliver more.
