Article - Your Ultimate Guide to Earned Value Management

 

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In my previous article “How to Explain Earned Value to Dummies” I touched upon the subject of Earned Value and how to explain it in a simple way. The post since went viral on LinkedIn generating several thousand hits. One of my followers expressed her desire to see someone (i.e. yours truly) describe the entire domain of EVM in a similar fashion. So, here you go!

Inputs:

  • You have to dig a trench by extracting 1,000 cubic meters of sand.
  • The duration of the project is 10 days (assume no initiation, planning or close-out stages, only execution)
  • Your budget is $5,000
  • You therefore believe that you should be digging 100m3/day and spending $500/day in order to finish this project on-time and on-budget.

As a result of these assumptions, you do the following (see Table 1):

  • Populate the “Scheduled Work” row with ten “100 m3/day figures
  • Populate the “Cumulative Work” row with incrementally increasing corresponding numbers (i.e. 100 m3/day, 200 m3/day, 300 m3/day, etc.)
  • Populate the “Budget” row with $500/day figures
  • Populate the “Cumulative Budget” row with incrementally increasing corresponding numbers (i.e. $500/day, $1,000/day, $1,500/day, etc.)
  • Finally, the “Planned Progress” numbers are equal to the “Cumulative Work” for that particular day divided by total work planned (i.e. 1,000 m3).

Table 1

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Now imagine that we are at the end of Day 5. Let us pretend that you extracted 10, 50, 70, 120 and 150 m3 on days 1-5 respectively, instead of a planned pace of 100m3/day (see “Actual Work Done” and “Cumulative Work Done” rows)

Imagine also that you also spent $500, $750, $520, $800 and $900 days 1-5 respectively, instead of a planned pace of 500$/day (see “Actual Spent” and “Cumulative Spent” rows).

Article - How to Explain Earned Value to Dummies

 

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In the course of my career I have encountered on numerous occasions a situation where executives, top managers and even project managers had issues with understanding the concept of Earned Value. So, I have developed a series of very simple examples to address that issue.

Imagine the following:

You have ten days to produce ten glasses at a total cost of $10. You project does not have Initiation, Planning or Close-out stages; only Execution and Monitoring. Having said that, it is reasonable to assume that you should be producing 1 glass a day and spending $1 per glass.

1 glass per day @ $1/glass

The key EV formulas are:

PV = Planned Quantity X Planned Cost

AC = Actual Quantity X Actual Cost

EV = Actual Quantity X Planned Cost

Schedule Variance = SV = EV – PV

Where:

  • SV = $0 means we are on plan in terms of spending (neutral)
  • SV > $0 means we are ahead of plan in terms of spending (good)
  • SV < $0 means we are behind plan in terms of spending (bad)

Cost Variance = CV = EV – AC

Where:

  • CV = $0 means we spent the same amount as the value of the work we received (neutral)
  • CV > $0 means we spent a lesser amount than the value of the work we received (good)
  • CV < $0 means we spent a greater amount than the value of the work we received (bad)

NOTE: Don’t worry if the formulas don’t make sense at this point of time, they will become clear very soon!

Let us examine several potential situations:

Day 7

7 glasses @ $2/glass

It is day 7 and you have produced 7 glasses at a cost of $14. Where do you think (without going into formulas) you are in terms of budget and time? It is day 7 and you have manufactured 7 glasses, so you are on time. However, you have exceeded your budget of $1/glass.

Let us examine the following situation using our formulas:

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Joke of the Day - Importance of Requirements

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To all my fellow business analysts out there :)

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About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca

Jamal is an author of three very popular books: 

News - FREE “Project Portfolio Management Case Studies - Financial Sector”!

 

Friends and colleagues!

After spending long hours in a small and stuffy studio, I was finally able to post my brand-new workshop on the Thinktank Consulting website. This one is called “Case Studies in Project Portfolio Management: Financial Sector”.

I have created a coupon that allows my LinkedIn friends to listen to this workshop for free (regular price $270). All you need to do is comment something along the lines of “Interested” or “Yes” and I will PM you the link. My only request is that you leave your review on the website. You will be prompted automatically by the website as early as 5-10 min into the course.

Also, please:

1) Share it

2) Like it

3) Tag your friends or managers who may benefit from it

4) Leave a review

Thanks in advance!

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FREE “Project Portfolio Management Case Studies - Telecommunications Sector”!

 

Friends and colleagues!

 

After spending long hours in a small and stuffy studio, I was finally able to post my brand-new workshop on the Thinktank Consulting website. This one is called “Project Portfolio Management Case Studies - Telecommunications Sector”.

 

I have created a coupon that allows my LinkedIn friends to listen to this workshop for free (regular price $270). All you need to do is comment something along the lines of “Interested” or “Yes” and I will PM you the link. My only request is that you leave your review on the website. You will be prompted automatically by the website as early as 5-10 min into the course.

 

Also, please:

 

1) Share it

2) Like it

3) Tag your friends or managers who may benefit from it

4) Leave a review

 

Thanks in advance!

Jamal

Joke of the Day - This is too funny!

 

Sorry, found this somewhere on the Internets ... Couldn't resist sharing :)

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About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca

Jamal is an author of three very popular books: 

  1. Delivering Exceptional Project Results: A Practical Guide to Project Selection, Scoping, Estimation and Management 
  2. Project Scope Management: A Practical Guide to Requirements for Engineering, Product, Construction, IT and Enterprise Projects
  3. Project Portfolio Management in Theory and Practice: Thirty Case Studies from around the World

Article - Project Portfolio Management – The Role of the PMO

 

The role of the PMO in the project portfolio management process can be generally divided into two domains: project prioritization and selection as well as project management and monitoring (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

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The first role of the PMO is to act as a filtration mechanism for all the incoming project proposals. It is very important to point out that project management office should not have a mandate to overturn or reject project requests. Its role is to accept the business cases, review them and whenever possible to point out inconsistencies or imperfections in these documents to the project champions.

First, the prerogative of project acceptance or rejection belongs only to the Portfolio Executive Committee consisting of the organization's executives. They and only they have the right to approve, reject, postpone or kill any project in the proposal pipeline.

Second, the role of the PMO is to work with the project champions in order to guide them in writing and "selling" their project proposals. here is an example of a conversation that may take place between the PMO manager and the project champion:

M: John, I looked over your business case for the CRM system replacement and overall it looks very good. My only concern is that you gave it ten out of possible ten points in the "Technical Feasibility" category ...

PC: Yes, and what is the problem?

M: Well this kind of score in this category implies that it would be a fairly simple project that can be done by our internal resources only.

PC: I think we can handle it internally ...

M: We had several other new system implementations projects recently. Remember, the ones for the risk management team and for the HR department. In both cases we had to rely on extensive support from the external consultants provided by the vendors ...I am not insisting on anything, but you will have to go in front of the executive committee and justify these projections.

PC: You are right, let us downgrade the score from ten out of ten to five out of ten.

Article - Project Portfolio Management: How to Maximize the Number of Project Proposals?

 

My recently published article “Why Should You Try to Generate as Many Project Proposals as Possible” has generated a lot of interest here and several of my friends reached out to me on various forums with the following question:

OK, we get that you need to generate as many project proposals as possible. But how do you do that?

One of the first steps to collecting the maximum possible number of proposals is to make the submission process simple. One of the tricks used by some of my clients was to publish the finalized version of the scoring model on the company Intranet that was accessible to all company employees. Another organization went as far as printing the scoring model on large posters and hanging them around their company's office, including the offices of the key decision makers (see Table 1).

Table 1

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Some other valuable strategies for maximizing the number of project proposals include:

  • Allowing your employees to participate in the preliminary ranking processes
  • Rewarding your workers financially for successful ideas
  • Running contests for the best project ideas
  • Inviting your customers, vendors and suppliers to participate in the process
  • Making the proposal submission process as easy and transparent as possible
  • Demonstrating the positive impact on sales
  • Publishing the final approved project list with the scores each proposal has generated (see Table 2).

Table 2

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