Yes, Absolutely, Burn Henrietta

 

There’s a classic scene in the 1956 movie, Around the World in 80 Days, where English aristocrat Phileas Fogg (played perfectly by David Niven) is on the last leg of his epic journey, and finds himself in the mid-Atlantic on board the tramp steamer Henrietta. Due to storms and adverse winds, the Henrietta runs out of fuel well short of England, and, if Fogg can’t make it back to the starting spot of his journey on-time, he will lose his wager, and can expect a future of poverty. Realizing his situation, he makes a bold decision: he purchases the steamer on the spot, and then orders all flammable materials on-board that do not directly contribute to the ship’s navigation capabilities to be broken up and fed to the furnaces that drive the steam system.

As various wood planks and assorted burnable pieces of the Henrietta arrive in the ship’s engine room, the ship’s first officer, played by Andy Devine, laments their loss. But, when the wooden carved figure from the bowsprit arrives, the first officer cries aloud “No, not Henrietta!” (presumably, the nickname of the bowsprit itself.)

Alas, Henrietta the Figurehead herself is fed to the furnaces, and the ship makes it to port soon enough for Fogg to complete his journey on-time, and collect on his bet.

What does this have to do with Project Management? Well, I’m glad you asked.

There have been multiple efforts of late, both in private and public sector PM circles, to develop something called “Earned Value light,” or an Earned Value Management System that is not overly encumbered by superfluous techniques or processes, and delivers cost and schedule performance information with minimal cost and fuss. I think the existence of such initiatives is ipso facto evidence that those I have previously referred to as “processors” have gained ascendency in the project management world, and have made something as basic and straight-forward as a working EVMS into an extremely difficult endeavor. It may be too late to turn back their insidious encroachments into legitimate management science, but I mean to make the attempt by asking: what, exactly, is an EVMS for? What’s its purpose? And, if that question can be clearly and cleanly answered, the next one is: which current practices attached to the set-up and maintenance of Earned Value Systems are superfluous, and should be dissuaded, if not out-and-out abandoned?

Here's my take: Earned Value Management Systems exist for one purpose, and one purpose only: to put into the hands of the project’s decision-makers the cost and schedule performance information they need to make, well, informed decisions.

That’s it.

Michael, Do You Realize What You’re Implying?

Yes, I’m crystal clear on what that definition implies for the answer to the follow-on question. For, if my definition is right, it follows that these practices have nothing at all to do with Earned Value:

1. The creation of a time-phased Estimate to Complete,
2. Comparing actual costs at the line-item level to their counterparts in the cost baseline’s Basis of Estimate (BoE),
3. Performing a “bottoms-up” Estimate at Completion,
4. Mandating that an extremely accurate and recent Master Resource Dictionary be used in time-phasing the budget,
5. …among many other practices and techniques that have been larded onto essential EVM, with the blessings (if not insistence) of so-called “experts.”

However, some prominent procedure or guidance-generating organizations have pushed these add-ons relentlessly, asserting outright that to avoid them is to fail to “do” EV correctly, which I hold to be so much rubbish.

It essentially boils down to this: put yourself in Phileas Fogg’s shoes, except in this case, rather than come up with the criterion needed to get the S.S. Henrietta to her destination (reminder: burnable with no connection to the ship’s ability to navigate), you need to come up with the criterion for producing usable cost/schedule performance information with an absolute minimum of effort, time, and cost. Which “must-have” aspects of EV would you abandon? Which would you keep? From my point of view, get rid of anything – anything – that did not directly support the collection of a basic time-phased budget, actual costs at the reporting level of the Work Breakdown Structure, and a reliable estimate of the tasks’ percent complete at the end of the reporting period, again at the reporting level of the WBS. For example, from the list above,

1. …serves to help improve resource allocation (theoretically – I’m not convinced, but that’s what its adherents claim),
2. …is supposed to improve the quality of the original estimates,
3. …comes from sheer ignorance of the accuracy of calculated EACs and the inaccuracy of re-estimated ones, and
4. …is also supposed to improve the quality of original estimates.

None of which, obviously, have anything to do with delivering cost and schedule performance information to PMs and other decision-makers. Everything else – everything – is superfluous, and should be abandoned.

Even Henrietta.