There are many discussions floating around about how and why to simplify the application of Earned Value. Some are credible some are not.
There are several places to look for the discussion of Earned Value. LinkedIn has a forum for EV.
One of the best is Paul Solomon's book and site. The current post describes an assessment of several government agencies.
Earned Value as a principle is applicable to any project. The 32 criteria of ANSI-748B need not be applied in their entirety outside a federal government program. But there are a minimal set of criteria needed for the success of EV. Here's a previous suggestion on those minimum criteria.
There are subtleties in reducing the EV processes. So when you "simplify" you must also maintain the discipline needed to produce Value from Earned Value:
- Maintaining the integrity of the baseline is critical - "rubber banding" the baseline is common practice in troubled programs or projects. When you overrun a work package, you've over run the work package. You're "off baseline." Report it and move one. Get a "get to green plan" for the remaining work.
- Maintaining the funding integrity is critical for government projects. This should also be critical for commercial project. This is not always the case. Without integrity of the funding sources future forecasting based on past decision is difficult.
- Performance management at the Work Package level for BCWS is as low as you want to go on a non-trivial project. Lower - at the task level - means change requests to the baseline occur all the time. The notion proffered by a few that managing at the task level for 5,000 tasks gives the program manager "control" is complete nonsense. It creates a nightmare for change control and traceability. Once change starts, the integrity of the baseline is lost and you're ability to forecast future performance with it.
Change to task sequencing should be a work package issue, not an EV baseline issue. Many fail to realize EV is a "time phased" measurement. If you don't start the work on the time you said you were, then you "off baseline." Move that up to the next level. Keep the natural variances inside the Work Package. Don't let them leak.Buy Paul's book, read it, mark it up. Read all the materials on Paul's site. Use EV on software projects. Increase your probability of success.
