That was the decision in my project as well, give the client the Cost Curve, & get the earned Value of work progressed to reflect the invoice claimed.

Well,

The issue of controlling the project internally should be undertaken by the two main indicators for cost & schedule (CPI & SPI) i guess it gives a very clear figure of where your are standing with your project.

But externally with the client, i guess all what he cares about in S-Curve is to see if what he is paying in an invoice is matching with what he is getting from his contractor as of monetary value of works done (when we claim for 10% of the contract value we should show 10% completed on our progress S-Curve), time for the client will be controlled by the Gantt charts.

As Alex said, not all clients are smart enough to know the difference between a cost & weight S-curves.

I had a discussion with our contracts administrator, & we agreed that we will breakdown the contract costs into the activities as per the payment terms (i.e. if you getting 20% of a procurement item when you place a purchase order so it will be reflected on your schedule a 20% of cost with the first step of the activity which you will breakdown into steps using the P5 new feature), we have agreed that procurement steps will be updated using the 0/100 percent, which means if not started its 0 %, when finished its 100% of the step.

Afterall, we have internally agreed in my company that we will not give the client an S-Curve but the cost to reflect our progress.

Moe

Beer would have solved it all, eh ? :D

Well, i believe the progress curve to be realistic it should be based on cost’s breakdown and as per your contract’s payment terms, some activities you cannot assign weight for it based on manpower (i.e. procurement of overseas items which will take 5 month to be delivered with zero manpower effort)

However Alex, it was good sharing those ideas with you buddy.

Best of luck

Moe

Alex,

I totally agree with that, my first question in that forum was about point no. 4 "Agree these figures with your client"

usually clients will try to reduce the weight factor for off-site activities, like procurement, engineering ..etc.

As that will reduce your project’s overall progress when you submit your invoice in the eraly stages of the project, we as contractors shouldnt try to have a front-end loaded progress weight, but in the mean time we want to be compensated for the effort done, so we will claim that the progress s-curve shouldnt be used to evaluate the invoices, instead a cost s-curve should be used instead using the contract unit rates loaded on the schedule.

which leaves the progress S-Curve usless, because the cost s-curve might show you a 10% completion while the progress weight curve will show you 5% only.

So what will be the real usage of the progress weight S-Curve ? it will be only usefull when rates are confedential & it has to reflect the monetary value of the activities, not the client’s opinion about how much of weight does that activity deserve.

Thats my point of view about it

Alex,

I can assign weight factors to my activities, i do it without using (CDI), just assigning a resource WGHT for each activity in my baseline & compare the progress later on using spreadsheets S-Curve, i really dont know how to export to excell a CDI distributed over a timeperiod (if u would elaborate further)

What am trying to say is there any best practiced way to assign those weighting factors to reflect the real weight of an activity ?

Usually what i do is that i will use the formula ((Activity Cost/Project Cost + Activity Duration/Total Activities Duration) / 2)=Activity Weight.

But sometimes as u said it gives unrealistic figures when it come to procurement i.e

& i dont want to discuss with my client some weights based on nothing, is there any concepts used when breaking down the weight factor to project activities ?

Regards,

Moe