Control Account Plan

A control account plan, also referred to by the anagram CAP, is a tool that is used to create a plan for all of the efforts and work to ultimately take place within a control account. Each individual control account plan is made up of some common, distinctive, and specific elements. These elements include a statement of work, in which the general breakdown of tasks to be conducted are delineated, a work schedule, which may be specifically broken down, or may be more broad-based, with the intention of breaking it down further at a later date, as well as a budget, typically broken down in a time-phased manner. Control account plans are typically the most effective to the management of a project when they are developed and implemented at the onset of a project; however they are effective tools to use whenever they are implemented within a project’s life cycle. The term control account plan had previously been referred to as a cost account plan.

This term is defined in the 3rd edition of the PMBOK but not in the 4th.