Earned Value

When we use Earned Value Management technique, we focus on:

• Planned Value Cost (PV) = Budget At Completion * Schedule % Complete
• Earned Value Cost (EV) = Budget At Completion * Performance % Complete (usually equal to Activity % Complete)
• Schedule Variance (SV) = EV - PV
• SV > 0 : project is good, ahead of schedule

So Planned Value Cost play a very important role here.

By default when we assign resource to activity, the unit is distributed equally (linear). Then calculation of Planned Value is as above.

If I asked you what the trickiest part of project management was for your enterprise, what would you say?  If you answered managing the diverse projects in your portfolio – you’re not alone. Most businesses work on a variety of projects (whether it be different contract types, duration or dollar amounts) that can be categorized into four major tiers:

Primavera P6 give us an option to decide that Baseline date is equal to Planned date or Current date.

The main purpose of this option is for Earned Value calculation.

Primavera support you to control project performance by Earned Value Management technique.

I will show you how to use it in Primavera.

In my career, I've worked across multiple industries and companies and one thing that stands out is the confusion surrounding the function of Project Controls and what it is meant to achieve.  There are Project Accountants, administrators or finance personnel who “do a bit of Project Controls” however, they are actually just producing monthly project financial reports, invoices and cash flows which are only some of the functions that Project Controls is meant to accomplish.

Over the years I have seen many articles, discussions and questions about Earned Value Management (EVM). What is it, how valuable is it as a management tool, how do you use it?  Often the explanation can be quite complex.  As is usual for experienced project managers or project cost practitioners we often talk in technical terminology.

If my team and I were on a mission to standardize our program control software, we might perform a benchmarking exercise. I firmly believe if we performed such an exercise, we would find that one-hundred different organizations would have at least one-hundred-five software architectures between them. In fact, that may be optimistic.