Executive Education

Description

Strategic Cost Analysis for Program and Project Management is drawn from our popular and highly-rated MBA courses on financial and managerial accounting and shows how you can leverage cost analysis to better influence the outcomes of product development and project management.

Led by Professor Joseph Weber, the head of the MIT Sloan Accounting Group, and Senior Lecturer Scott Keating, the program offers a series of interactive lectures, cases, and small group exercises that will help you to better understand:

• the language and mechanics of the accounting that goes on in complex organizations
• how to identify good results even though the accounting numbers look bad, and bad results when the accounting numbers look good
• cost allocations, absorption costing, and transfer pricing, and their effect on reported performance
• your own company’s internal metrics for evaluating management

The Participants

This program has been developed for senior program and project managers from a wide range of consumer and business-to-business industries, including those from engineering, manufacturing, IT and technology departments, directors of project management, product and business development, and R&D, chief project engineers, product design and process development engineers, and key members of their staff with performance responsibility.

Faculty

Joseph P.Weber is a tenured Associate Professor in Economics, Finance, & Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He specializes in empirical work on the importance of accounting information in financial markets. One stream of research focuses on how managers choose among accounting methods (i) when communicating corporate financial performance and (ii) when designing and implementing contracts between the firm and its managers and creditors. A second stream of research focuses on the effects of audit quality, disclosure quality, and financial analysts on the functioning of capital markets.

Scott Keating is a Senior Lecturer in Economics, Finance, & Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on understanding the internal workings of large and complex organizations. Keating is specifically interested in the role of internal accounting practices – such as accounting based performance measurement and compensation programs, transfer pricing policies, costing systems, and cost allocation practices – in regulating organizational activities. He teaches an undergraduate course in financial accounting and a second-year MBA elective in managerial accounting.