Tham khảo tài liệu 'pearson education of management accounting_10', kinh doanh - tiếp thị, quản trị kinh doanh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 306 CHAPTER 8 MAKING CAPITAL INVESTMENT DECISIONS smoothly ahead. Managers will need to manage the project actively through to completion. This in turn will require further information-gathering exercises. Management should receive progress reports at regular intervals concerning the project. These reports should provide information relating to the actual cash flows for each stage of the project which can then be compared against the forecast figures provided when the proposal was submitted for approval. The reasons for significant variations should be ascertained and corrective action taken where possible. Any changes in the expected completion date of the project or any expected variations from budget in future cash flows should be reported immediately in extreme cases managers may even abandon the project if circumstances appear to have changed dramatically for the worse. We saw in Real World on p. 289 that Rolls-Royce undertakes this kind of reassessment of existing projects. No doubt most other well-managed businesses do this too. Project management techniques for example critical path analysis should be employed wherever possible and their effectiveness reported to senior management. An important part of the control process is a post-completion audit of the project. This is in essence a review of the project s performance to see if it lived up to expectations and whether any lessons can be learned from the way that the investment process was carried out. In addition to an evaluation of financial costs and benefits non-financial measures of performance such as the ability to meet deadlines and levels of quality achieved should also be reported. We should recall that total life-cycle costing which we discussed in Chapter 5 is based on similar principles. The fact that a post-completion audit is an integral part of the management of the project should also encourage those who submit projects to use realistic estimates. Real World provides some evidence
