Came across a nice You Tube video of applying EV. There are three simple reasons for EV to monitor a project
- Knowing where you are against the plan
- Knowing how much you spent against the budget
- Knowing what is left to done
From these three you can forecast how long it's going to take to complete the project and how much it will cost to reach this completion date.
Now if you don't have a plan then who cares abotu knowing where you are in the plan. If you don't have a budget for the project, then who cares about where are in the budget. And if you are working on a "level of effort" project, then you don't care when you done.
So if you software development project is using agile - poor agile BTW - and you don't have a planned completion date, then EV adds no value. If you gile project has no budget - a Not To Exceed value - then you could care less about measuring budget performance. And most importantly, if your agile project is being driven by the customers requirements and those are changing all the time, then who cares about knowing about how much work is left, because there is no way to know this.
So EV is worthless in this context. - Yea Right
If you have a project where the requirements are emerging in the presence of no budget limits, call me, I want to work that project. How fun. I want to spend the customers money, react to the whims of the customer, and work to short term deadlines - sprints - and forget the long term commitments to stay on budget and complete on or before the deadline.
Yea Right
