Headed home from PMI's College of Performance Management (CPM) Spring conference in Naples Florida. I gave three papers, one solo, one with another persopn, and one with three of us doing a "role playing" skit of a Program Manager, Government IPT Lead, and Me as the narrator like they did in Greek times, when the audience needed an explanation of what was going on.
The papers and associated workshops focused on Technical Performance Measures, Physical Percent Complete and "Getting to Green Midstream." These are Earned Value Management topics, connected with the Performance Measurement Baseline. The papers are on the PMI-CPM web site, but I'll send updated versions to SlideShare, since we "made them better" after they went out on the CD.
The conference was good in several senses. We reconnected with old friends, put real faces with names from LinkedIn and other professional forums. Exchanged business cards, swapped war stories (active and retired military tend to gravitate to EVMS), and did some business development with current and new clients.
At the conference there were some presentations that didn't make sense in light of the current DoD 5000.02 guidance and other documents, but that's the reason for conferences like this.
Another Item
On EVM LinkedIn and in a couple of conversations there is this notion that EV has anomalies. While care is needed to apply Earned Value in a credible way, one of the hugely misunderstood aspects of EV is Schedule Variance. There is a notion that SV can equal zero and the project can be seriously late. Well technically SV=0 at the end of the project of course. AND if SV is measured at the end AND if the end is a year past the planned end, then YES SV=0 and the project is a year late. But let's look at a quote first
I love the sound deadlines make as they whoosh past - Douglas Adams
The notion that the project is at its end and the SV=0 AND at the same time, we ignored that fact we passed the Planned Finish is, how should I say, illogical. Here's a picture to go with the numbers...
If you look at the SV on the planned completion date, you'll see that SV=18.8 and SP=1.23. We're 23% behind schedule on the day before the last day of the planned completion date.. This should be glaringly obvious to the PP&C and PM staff from the EV numbers. This would set off alarms long before we got anywhere close to the planned completion date. This is the role of SV and CV - to provide actionable information to the decision makers.
So what can we say about this popular urban myth of Earned Value? Well, I don't know, but maybe working a program for awhile using the EV numbers to make decisions might provide some insight that EV is a powerful tool in the hands of qualified users to provide insight into future performance.
Now There Are REAL Problems of Course
The units of measure of SV are dollars (or currency). This of course makes no sense - "we're $160,000 dollars behind schedule." If we spend another $160,000 we'll catch up? Only if money and time are equal, if productivity is linear, and if what we "didn't" do for the $160,000 can be re cooped by spending more money.
SV can be measured with EV, and the government's Contract Performance Report states that. But the REAL schedule variance can be - and must be - determined through measures of technical performance against the planned technical performance. This is the role of Technical Performance Measures (TPM). They state what technical maturity is planned to be delivered at what point in the project.
The PMI-CPM conference had several education sessions on TPMs, those briefings will be on the CPM web site. Here are the two presentations
View more presentations from Glen Alleman.
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