Many organizations have transformed their business in order to survive and compete in the future. They generate projects by creating a vision, using strategies and objectives with funds aligning strategies and make efforts to complete them successfully because project success leads to business success. All projects have triple constraints such as scope, time, and cost to be completed. Project cost performance is a key factor to achieve project goals and which is mostly related with risks among various cost drivers. Projects require a cost estimation method to complete them within their budget and on time. An accurate budget cannot be estimated due to the uncertainties and risks. Thus some additional money should be funded in addition to the base budget as a contingency reserve for identified risks and a management reserve for unidentified risks. While research on contingency reserve for identified risks included in project budget baseline have been presented, research on management reserve for unidentified risks included in total project budget is still scarce. The lack of research on estimation method and role of the management reserve have made project managers little confidence to estimate project budget accurately with reasonable basis. This study proposes a practical model to estimate budgets including contingency and management reserves for not only project cost management but also to keep the balance of organization’s total funds to maximize return on investments for project portfolio management. The advantages of the proposed model are demonstrated by its application to construction projects in Korea and the processes to apply this model for verification are also provided.

The existing standard cost of project management of empowerment sector in general rural development project has problems with standard cost system without considering characteristics of empowerment project and unclear division of works. These problems are a lot of trouble to fulfill the project. Thus, it needs an arrangement of standard cost considering detailed characteristics of project management in the empowerment sector. The contents and results of this study can be summarized as follows. 1) To set accurate standard cost, we carried out three-step processes, such as elicitation of standard works, calculation of workload and determination of standard cost. (1) In an investigation of 30 rural area dividing 8 parts about an workload of empowerment project, an average workload is 1,499 hours. (2) Based on this results, the standard cost is calculated at 15% of project cost in over 600 million won, at 28.75% of project cost in under 500 million won, by standards of empowerment project cost. 2) It set the responsibility management cost to 15% of empowerment project cost considering existing awareness, workload and work professionalism of project management. Based on the results, It suggested the practical use as basis for efficient management of the future empowerment projects. To achieve this, It needs to promote maximizing results on the whole project through the legalization processes including amendment of existing regulations.