What is Earned value management?

Answer 1

Project Management involves management of three variables in a project - cost, time and performance (sometimes cited as quality or scope). Conventional managerial models such as Gantt Charts and CPM/PERT Networks consider modelling project in terms of time alone. Earned value management is an attempt to integrate cost and time variables into professional project management.

The essence is to represent value (in terms of cost of project) against time of execution as a graph called planned value curve during planning of a project. Thereafter during actual execution, the actual value of work completed is plotted on the requisite intervals of time to get what is called an Earned Value curve. A comparison of earned value and planned value curves along with a similar plot of actual cost versus time, throws considerable light on project delays and cost over-runs.

Of course, there are many images and formulae that need to provided to elucidate the concept, but much information of that sort is available on the net. You may prefer to read the wikipedia pages, with this background.

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a project control process based on a structured approach to planning, cost collection and performance measurements. It facilitates the integration of project scope, time and cost objectives and the establishment of a baseline plan for performance measurement (schedule, progress and budget). EVM focuses on useful work done and not just on money/time spent. It effectively measures the efficiency of the work in progress and provides an indication of likely out turns by facilitating trend analysis techniques. A by-product of the technique is that to measure progress, tighter controls are usually required and this usually means projects are better managed. Beware EVM requires considerable administrative organisation and effort in order to implement (new/modified processes and computer systems) and the collect the data. EVM takes a holistic view of the project, so over-performance in one area may well hide under-performance in another. In summary the benefits of EVM are that it gives repeatable answers (how well a project is doing, how will it will do, how well it could do and identify areas of under achievement), provides reliable information to aid decision making, provides data for future estimates of similar work and helps the development of standard curves to assist with target setting for future projects. The equations for EVM have not been mentioned, and if readers want to find out more, then they should investigate concepts such as Budgeted Cost of Work Schedule (BCWS), Actual Cost of Work Performed (ACWP), Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and Cost performance Index (CPI) to name but a few.