This week our assignment was to find two resources that would be beneficial in estimating the costs, effort and/or activity durations associated with ID projects. “Project managers must develop budgets in order to obtain the resources needed to accomplish project objectives. Often, project managers are required to prepare project budgets in order to receive the go-ahead from top management to proceed with projects” (Portny et al, 2008). In my search efforts, I found the following resources:
Bright Hub – Bright Hub is a great resource that was created to speed up the workflow. They have built in templates with calculations already set up to assist in the development of the project budget. The Excel templates have three different pages:
An Overall Project Budget Page that accounts for all income and expenses associated with the project.
A Monthly Project Budget Page that accounts for expenses and is broken down by months
A Task Project Budget Page that breaks down the budget by task and category
These templates are basic and seem very easy to use. Each template has information provided to give the user a brief overview of what items should and should not be included in the budget.
Project Management for Instruction Designers – This website is a great resource to refer to when first starting out. It is actually an online book that was tailored specifically for instructional designers. Chapter 8 talks about Project Time Management and Chapter 9 is a great resource for Project Costs and Budgeting. I like this resource because it basically takes you from the beginning of a project to the very end.
Amado, M., Ashton, K., Ashton, S., Bostwick, J., Clements, G., Drysdale, J., Francis, J., Harrison, B., Nan, V., Nisse, A., Randall, D., Rino, J., Robinson, J., Snyder, A., Wiley, D., & Anonymous. (DATE). Project Management for Instructional Designers. Retrieved from http://pm4id.org/. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) license.
Levine, R. (2011). Use our excel project budget template to simply your life. Retrieved from http://www.brighthub.com/office/project-management/articles/75727.aspx
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc