Mike FrenetteManager, IT PMO| Halifax Water (retired)Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Earned Value Management can be a complex topic. I am curious to know how many people use it at a detailed level.
On some projects, I've seen it used at the deliverable level only to provide indicators of progress only, and to cause our PMs to focus on activities that lead to deliverables in the WBS, rather than on activities. This tends to lead progress reports toward what has been delivered, or at least how much of a deliverable has been completed, rather than what people were doing. In other words, is the deliverable done or not done and for larger deliverables, is there an objective measure that can be used to generate a percent complete that is closer to reality than your typical SWAG.
What level of earned value do you use, if any? Saving Changes...
Sort By:
Cyril GuichardProgram Manager| AGC Automotive (contractor via MCA Benelux)Forchies-La-Marche, Belgium
I never went that far into details in EVM. I use it at Work Package level in general.
Going to far into details might give you a better insight but also a tremendous amount of consolidation work at project level. I worked on a defence project worth €115M for which we had around 30 WPs. The consolidation was 1 to 2 full days each month to make sure everything we would report was correct. I can't imagine if we went as low as the deliverables... Saving Changes...
Cyril, I do not think Mike means deliverable to be as detailed a level. Activity is detailed level, Work Package is a level above it. I understand every activity must deliver some deliverable but Mike probably means deliverable in broader sense where some people use Product Breakdown Structure (PBS) in place of a WBS and in that major deliverables are monitored for progress. This way it is rather an abstract level and not as detailed as you are assuming.
Mike, I have seen people using deliverables for earned value measure but that cannot be an exact measure or at least cannot be better than when you are managing this at activity level, which is far detailed in nature. I refer assigning budgeted value at activity level and that makes it more reliable. As Cyril suggested, work package level is also doable but not as exact as activity level. I would suggest to use some automated tool as I think taking 1-2 days to consolidate results at work packages is too much time. You can do that instantly even at activity level, if you are using some good software package.
