Hi,
Im looking at conducting earned value without any sort of formal company proceedure and i thought i would get your opinions?
We have some activities in our schedule that will be actualised even though the work has not been fully completed. This is because it is a rail project and the possessions which have define starts and finishes have to end then (to hand the track back). However if all our expected work was not complete on time (and we will have to plan a future activity to complete) automatically primavera marks activity (physical or duration) as 100% complete.
Hows the best way to do earned value on this, because even if actual units/costs are less then the software will think at 100% complete that we have come in under budget?
Any ideas?
Gary,
Your point 1 and 2 are the solution. The inherited program has activities that could take 6 hours to complete. Some of those activities they could start but may not have time to complete. They can make safe the track and plan to come back during another shutdown. That is why on a 8hr 5 day calender you would have to close the activity so as not to drag resources out for weeks until the next shutdown. I can either break down the activities more, or set the possession works onto specific calenders so that it isnt actualised it falls under the next possession slot.
Anthony,
1) How long are your activities typically? For work during rail possessions, I recommend decomposing them into as many small duration activities as possible -ideally no duration longer than a single shift. Do this, and you will have (among other benefits) less issues around partialy completed activities at the end of a possession.
2) I'm not sure what set up you are using which allows or even (shudder) forces Primavera to automatically mark activites as 100% complete when they are not, but I would stop that right now. The software cannot know when an activity is complete unless the user tells it. Any setting which assumes otherwise is flawed and dangerous.
3) I'm not sure how you're modelling your possessions, but I would do it using calendars. That way if you do get an activity which isn't completed during a possesion as planned, the remaining portion of the work will just get scheduled to occur during your next available possession instead. If you know the physical limit on how much work can occur in parallel during a single possession, you can also model this using resource levelling and resource calendars.
Just an update on this,
What if i continue to hold my units/costs at activity level but i calculate EV using WBS level. If i use weighted steps to calculate the performance percent complete at wbs level then i can close off activities and replan them later on within the wbs. Does that sound like it might work?