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So you want to go with Earned Value as a way of tracking time and cost performance? Good for you. Here are 5 pre-requisites that you’ll need to consider before you really get into the detail of doing the work.
Oh, and this assumes that you’ve already ticked the pre-requisite that is ‘team and manager on board for a major change in how we track project performance’ because EV is quite a culture shock to the uninitiated.
With that out the way, let’s dive in!
Pre-req #1. Detailed Scope
You’ll need to have a work breakdown structure in place, with a degree of detail you perhaps haven’t had to focus on before.
In order to track your progress against your scope you have to know what the scope is. Without that, you’re going to struggle to get any degree of accuracy in your reporting. Break down your tasks to a decent level as well, so that you aren’t struggling to report progress on a task that’s gigantic.
Pre-req #2. A Timetable
Armed with your breakdown of tasks you can then start adding dates to them. Again, if you want to track whether you are hitting your milestones and working ahead or behind schedule, you need to start from somewhere. This is your baseline schedule.
Build out your dates for each element on the work breakdown structure. Make sure they take into account the fact that your estimates are realistic and that you’ve got the agreement of the team member involved before committing them to anything.
This is the point to layer over your resourcing and capacity planning, so that you aren’t scheduling work in a vacuum. Take into account holidays and other absences so your schedule is as accurate as it can be.
Pre-req #3. A Breakdown of Costs
Earned Value is only good for tracking time and cost performance. It’s very good at that, but it’s not going to give you the context for changes or a feeling for how quality is being achieved (or not). The timetable gives you the info you need to start thinking about tracking time; a cost breakdown structure gives you the info for tracking cost.
Take your work breakdown structure and cost it out. Whether you do this top down, bottom up or some other method of applying costs to work packages – it doesn’t really matter. However you get there, the end result is the same. You should be able to apply a fixed cost to a piece of work that has a scheduled completion date.
Pre-req #4. A Plan for Reporting Progress
Next, you need to establish an approach for reporting progress with the team. This sounds more straightforward than it is because you’ll need to be able to say what % complete through a task is, and some tasks don’t breakdown nicely.
For example, if part of your task involves ordering kit and then you have to wait until it’s delivered and then you do something with it to set it up, your work and expenses aren’t going to be evenly spread across all the days allocated to that task. It would be better to split the work into two tasks: Order Kit (which finishes at the time that the kit is delivered and costs as much as the kit costs) and then Do Something With Kit (which takes as long as it takes and costs the amount you bill for resources).
Generally you’ll report whether a task is not yet started, in flight or complete, so you should to agree whether the % complete targets of 0%, 50% and 100% are adequate for your needs. And, for each task, what 50% looks like. That could be quite easy with some tasks, especially where the work is spread evenly over the time – it’s where work isn’t spread evenly that makes it a bit harder to predict.
You can go as granular as you like but don’t get so hung up on working this out that you never get started tracking EV in earnest.
Pre-req #5. A Plan for Collecting The Data
When you’ve got agreement on how progress is going to be measured, you should agree with your team how they are going to get that progress to you. This is likely to be in the same way that they do now, in your non-EV world, either through checking in with you during the task formally or informally, completing a status report or giving an update at your regular team progress meeting.
It simply sets expectations so that everyone knows what they should be doing and when.
With those 5 pre-requisites in place you should be good to start monitoring time and cost performance with your EV spreadsheets and tools.
I found a good (short) video from Simon Harris introducing EV so if this article has given you the appetite to take it further, watch this.
Posted on: June 27, 2017 08:59 AM |
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