I agree with jp582 in being that variance reports are essential when it comes to the monitoring and controlling process of a project. They compare actual current value of the project to what was anticipated, basically comparing any variance to the established baseline. It is a good measure of a project’s status in terms of schedule and cost. I would like to add that from lecture, we learned that the progress of a project can be tracked in sort of two coordinates. Those two coordinates being schedule and cost. Keeping this in the back of your head is very important as you could be ahead of schedule, however you could be over budget. Vice-versa, you could be under budget but behind in schedule. Including both measures of variance in the variance report is definitely needed for both monitoring and controlling.