Wednesday, September 14, 2005

No Earned Value Acronyms for Management

There's a good post on the Defense Acquisition University's EVM (Earned Value Management) Forum suggesting a good format for management reporting.

The submitter, Mr. Roger Mandel, makes a good case for protecting management from the details and acronyms inherent in Earned Value and offering the basics in a report.

Check out his recommended format. Looks pretty good to me...

1. Summary Status: (Stated here are the major facts in bullet format. Statements shall be clear and concise.)

2. Major Achievements & Future Scheduled tasks: (List those major milestones that have been accomplished during this past performance period and those that are schedule for the current or near term performance periods.)

3. Trends: (Stated here are the major trends, as the data indicates. Emphasize the present major problem. Phrase the statements in the form of a question. In a few cases, there may be more than one problem. A good problem statement will be concise, usually only one sentence.) Graphic figures should also be used.

4. Projections: (List the possible projections to the major trends. Develop alternative ways to solve the problem, generally more than one possible solution. Briefly note the advantages and disadvantages of each possible solution. State the projected completion period and total final cost.)

5. Choice and Rationale: (State choice from among possible solutions and the detailed reasons for that choice. State why certain alternatives were not chosen.)

6. Areas of Concern: (List cost accounts of task items that are prominent schedule or cost drivers that could cause significant variances.) Some form of a Stop Light chart could be used for a quick overview.

7. Validity of Data: (Comment of noted discrepancies within the submitted report and any concerns for the validity of data presented.)
See below for the full posting...

ACC: Acquisition Community Connection

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posted by Jerry Manas @ 7:20 PM, Read More...  
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2 Comments:

At 11:01 PM, Anonymous Garry L. Booker said...

Mr. Mandel is a leading voice for using plain English instead of specialized EVM jargon. He has even created a plain English version of the "EVM Gold Card" -- the popular one-page summary of EVM concepts. While using plain English is definitely a step in the right direction, I think the marketability problems of EVM go much deeper: the idea of actually USING earned value management data TO MANAGE seems to have been lost! The discipline used to be called Earned Value Analysis (EVA). In an effort to encourage managers to use earned value data as a decision-making aid, the name of the discipline was changed to Earned Value MANAGEMENT. So, it seems to me that hiding Earned Value Management data FROM management is a very curious thing. Instead, we should be focusing on making EVM more user friendly, so everyone can use it to make decisions (not just analysts).

By the way, analytical reports to management are great, but compelling scoreboards are better. A compelling scoreboard is visible, dynamic, and accessible. (See Steven Covey's book The 8th Habit). The adjectives "visible, dynamic and accessible" do not describe most EVM systems.

/Garry Booker
www.projectfrontier.com

 
At 10:13 PM, Blogger Jerry Manas said...

Garry, great insights. I totally agree with the concept of a visible, dynamic, and accessible scoreboard, which many Enterprise PM tools have these days.

I think they key is to have more people understand how to drill down and interpret what the EVM information is saying (by looking further into the schedule or taling to resources). Often, people misinterpret EVM metrics-- even project managers.

For example, if EVM shows that we're headed toward an Estimate-at-Completion to be way under budget, that may indeed be good news and maybe some savvy resource found a better way to do something. Or maybe things were just way overestimated. Or maybe we had a stroke of luck and the tasks later in the project won't be so easy or are more complex (one inherent flaw in EAC when used with the CPI adjuster is that it assumes we'll stay on the current trajectory).

I agree, I think making EVM more user friendly would go a long way toward avoiding misinterpretation. At the least, I'd suggest guidelines (or "popups") to assist with interpreting what potential things the metrics could mean.

 

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