Do we really need to calculate earned value for project?

budget (Photo credit: 401K)

What is earned value: It measures cost , schedule, and work done.Its a way to measure projects progress and provide budget variances. Its a indicator of schedule, budget,and milestone.It also gives us percentage of work done, budget spent, and time consumed. So the units to measure it is dollars and and work hours.

So whats the next step to calculate EV:

Prepares a WBS(work break down structure) to quantify each task as phases and then phases into modules, modules into more detail units as it descends with time-frame for each task have fixed time which gives us a baseline structure.

Lets understand some terms:

BCWS - Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled
ACWP - Actual Cost of Work Performed
BCWP - Budgeted Cost of Work Performed

From above terms earned value will be defined as "Cost incurred to accomplish the work that has been done to date."

Derived metrics known as Schedule variance and Cost variance, if they fall into negative zone then project is in problem either by schedule slippage or by over budget.

Earned value measurement helps us in forecasting and status reporting of the project.

Comments

Agile vs. Metrics

Vectorized from: Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle: Agile Software Development with Scrum Prentice Hall PTR, 2001 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Over the years, its by human nature to quantify most of the aspect when it comes to Return on investment . Project dashboard are meant to provide bird view of the project's overall health from a top level perspective. Although it gives a broad level view of the time lines , resource utilization, budget and so on so forth. Can we quantify performance indicators like human aspect of deliverable like motivation levels of team members, quality of customer sustenance, business continuity etc. Since emotional intelligence has certain predominance over IQ definitely it matters. In concurrent times of agile development where practices like scrum, iterative development , extreme programming are kind of just in time techniques to deliver solutions to different kind of projects. can we be able to quantify human aspect of indicators in agile ...

Aligning Projects with CSR (Corporate social responsibility)

CSR ( Corporate social responsibility ) in context to Project management : Projects are unique entity units, they have a start and a logical end. Projects executes in a time frame with certain goals and objectives to achieve by the end of project and obviously Business as whole is connected with project where sustainability matters. Project managers seek responsibility and accountability from each team members in projects to make project a success, there comes the role of CSR wherein project managers can engage project members to achieve the stated objectives in a project in a sustainable way with responsibility. Corporates do CSR but at the corporate level, if we drill down CSR initiatives at the implementation level and align operational objectives with CSR which can drive projects in a holistic way by driving individuals inside-out from organization perspective and projects outside-in. CSR is just not one word but a gamut of activities are associated with it where in on...

Games People Play in context to Projects

Games People Play in context to Projects: Contextually life and projects full of games, work on dynamics of human relationships by Dr. Eric Berne guides us not only in many social but relationship situations in corporate world also. In Todays concurrent world where we are living in a global village with Orkut, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and other social media leads to discounts of information in social network, where more of transactional games played knowingly(conscious) or unknowingly(unconscious). Precede to this let us understand game, A game full of transactions played with different roles by players changing their roles for a outcome in different ego states like Parent, Adult and Child ego states that will payoff. Continuing with Payoff, specifically in context to Project teams where transactions happen at concrete or transformational levels where people not necessarily behaving rationally and motivat...

Project Portfolio-Program Management

Search This Blog