I am currently working on a capstone project. We won a $3000 URI grant to design and fabricate our device. This grant must be used only for this project. As a result, we based our entire budget around this $3000, not considering if we could potentially do it for less or if we need more since those were not options. As a result, we unfortunately cannot see outright if there was a positive or negative cost variance. However, this discussion thread brings up a good point that it is useful to go back and analyze that. In purchasing materials, since we had room in our budget we bought different variations of the components to then test which performed best. However, if we were aiming for a certain cost variance I am curious to see if we would have had to limit the different options and experimentations we have tried. On the other hand, scheduling was another reason we had to buy all the variations at once and spend the entire budget at once since going through purchasing can take a long time.