Assigning Responsibility in Earned Value Management

 

The Practice Standard for Earned Value sets out the Assign Responsibility process, which is simply a way of making sure everyone knows who is doing what. It’s important in earned value because you need someone to take ownership for every piece of work – that’s the best way to track at each individual element of the work breakdown structure.

Inputs

There is only one input to the Assign Responsibility process and that’s the scope baseline.

What to do

Assigning responsibility isn’t a great name for this process, because ideally individuals in the team will volunteer for the responsibility, knowing that it is part of their job role. I prefer to allow people to step into the responsibility rather than forcing it on them, because I think you gain better buy in and results that way.

However, sometimes I have been known to specifically say, “So I’ll write you down as the owner for that task?” and call out someone as the individual responsible, in a nice way.

Assigning responsibility is about more than someone knowing it is their job to do the work. It’s also about making sure everyone else knows that it is their role, and that it is officially documented somewhere. That’s what this process does.

Create an organisation structure for the project. I tend to do that in PowerPoint, simply making a structure chart with names on that I can then drop into the relevant project documentation. You might have to create several ‘layers’ of your chart so that everyone responsible for substantive pieces of work for the purposes of EV tracking has their information documented.

The Practice Standard recommends that you take the list of people responsible for things and map them against the WBS to create a matrix instead of using an org chart structure. That certainly gives you more granularity and makes it very clear who is doing what.

Outputs

The outputs for the Assign Responsibility process are:

• The organisational breakdown structure – the hierarchy diagram that shows which team/area are involved in the project
• The Responsibility Assignment Matrix

The RAM matrix is a bit different to the traditional RACI matrix because it lists the work packages from the WBS across the top and then the teams or individuals down the side. Look at the relevant intersections and where they meet, put a cross to mark the fact that this person (or team) is responsible for this part of the WBS.

Each X marks a control account: an area of work that is going to be tracked and managed by a control account manager. This is the team leader responsible for doing the work, but CAM is the term used in the world of earned value.

How detailed should you make the plans?

There’s no right answer to this. The WBS and the OBS should be as detailed as necessary to get the job done. Go down to the right level for your project – you’ll have to use your professional judgement for this.

Ideally you are looking for control accounts to be at a level of complexity and scale that makes it possible for them to be managed adequately by one person. Too detailed, and you’ll end up with people responsible for fragments of work and so many control accounts that they are hard to manage in their entirety. Too few and the CAMs won’t truly be able to control the work within them as the tasks will rely on too many people or activities outside of their control.

Plus, think about how much time and energy you and the CAMs have got to dedicate to the admin of running a low-level, detailed plan. Do you really want to take on the management of a lot of tiny things? Isn’t there some saving to be had in combining a few more work packages and making your control accounts sit at the next level up?

Ultimately, you’ll have to make the call but don’t make it too hard for yourself or your team.

Managing changes

You might be thinking: that’s all very good but what happens when things change? Well, things always change, and you have to be alert to that. Respond to changes as and when they happen, using the change control process that you’ve adopted.

Make sure that the CAM impacted by the change (or group of CAMs if there are several) know what has changed and what that means for their work. Update the documentation accordingly. That assumes that you know about the change before the CAM – and sometimes that won’t be the case. They’ll be coming to you with suggestions for changes, so in that case, push them through the change control process and update the rest of the team as appropriate.

The Assign Responsibility process is really all about making sure people know what falls into their remit. If you work with an experienced in-house team, you probably won’t have much difficulty here. If you work with contractors, sub-contractors or external suppliers, make sure that the boundaries of their work are clear – this process helps formalise all of what you should be doing already.

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