Justifying Cost Overruns: Defend Your Budgets with Clarity and Impact
Faced with exploding budgets, decisions to justify, and sponsors to convince… how can you explain cost overruns without losing credibility? This 1.5-hour e-learning course was designed to help project managers and their sponsors master the ins and outs of budget justification in an increasingly demanding environment.
Why take this training?
Because a poorly explained cost overrun can:
- Damage the relationship of trust with your stakeholders
- Jeopardize the achievement of project objectives
- Reduce your room for maneuver on future trade-offs
Conversely, knowing how to justify a budget overrun with method, transparency, and assertiveness strengthens your position and secures project management.
This e-learning module will allow you to:
- Understand the typical causes of overruns in projects (estimation errors, unforeseen events, changes in scope, etc.)
- Identify expectations sponsors’ specific financial reporting requirements
- Master concrete levers for budget justification combining data, assumptions and documented decisions
- Adapt your communication according to profiles (CFO, PMO, general management) and contexts (emergency, strategic project, external constraints)
A pedagogical progression in 6 structured modules:
- Why do these costs slip? – Awareness of the challenges of overruns
- Understanding the fundamentals – Key concepts: budget forecasting, variance, cost at completion, drift
- Applying best practices – Justification methods: numerical data, scenarios, trade-offs
- Adapting to varied contexts – Communication according to the interlocutors & hierarchical levels
- Sponsor interview simulator – Practice defending your budget in a realistic exchange!
- Final mega quiz – Validate your knowledge with an interactive and dynamic quiz
An ideal course for:
- Project managers faced with budgetary discrepancies
- Operational sponsors wishing to better understand and challenge decisions
- Financial management professionals in a project environment
This course is 100% digital, accessible on any device, and uses interactive approaches: role-playing, video clips, quick quizzes, immersive simulator.