The Case For Earned Value

  ProjectsAtWork  

Quentin Fleming says there's no reason to shy away from earned value on your next project. It's not as difficult as you think.

The buzz about earned value is getting louder. It's a hot topic at seminars for project managers and in the field's professional literature. Software makers offer tools to support it. But why are so few projects using earned value? After all, what project manager wouldn't want a truer picture of whether a project is on budget and on schedule relative to the value of the work completed?

The difficulty lies in the perceptions surrounding earned value. Many project managers think it is a complex metric reserved for big government and defense projects. Not so, says Quentin Fleming, one of earned value's long-standing champions and the co-author of "Earned Value Project Management." Projects@Work asked Fleming to discuss the value of this performance measurement tool for any project.

P@W: You've been on the earned value bandwagon for decades. The concept is becoming more popular now. Still, it means different things to different people. Can you summarize what it means to you?

Quentin Fleming: Notice that I don't call it earned value management. I call it earned value project management, with an emphasis on project. I do that deliberately because earned value is a great technique to use in the management of projects. I want to avoid the mistake that …

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