Project Management Class: Cost

Unlike the time management section, cost is definitely something I can relate to better.

I've taken classes in high school where the profit and measuring cost were high priority. Granted they were more geared towards business than an IT project, but the info is the same here as it was there.
Estimating cost and potential profits over the course of a business venture was something I did experience however. The principals are the same. The cost of production, the resources needed, what and who our market base was. What it came down to was that we needed to find out what the resources we needed were and how much it would cost to purchase and use them.
This was again in high school, during an entrepreneurship course. So we were only allowed to create a business on school grounds and sell only to students and staff. Naturally of course this took place during lunch hour so it became obvious to us that having some sort of food would be a good idea. We played around with a few ideas but after we saw that we had to fund the entire thing ourselves any and all of our grand ideas were thrown out.
Eventually we settled on making pretzels as we knew how to make them and the ingredients were relatively inexpensive. Once we settled on that we tried calculating how expensive each pretzel would be and what our expected gains would be. That took a while and its been so long that I forget the exact amount we came to. But using that info we estimated what our profit would be, and after we went and looked at it from a more realistic perspective we found that we could break even.

That second estimation turned out to be correct. We did break even, which was a lot better than a few other groups that were with us. Though a few actually made around $50 in profit, which we thought was really impressive.

All in all the cost management and estimation for a project was pretty similar to how it worked the last time.