Saturday, October 15, 2005

Earned Schedule; Making up for Earned Value's Shortcomings

Back on August 12th, we posted a link to a great writeup on Earned Schedule by Walt Lipke, one of the creators of Earned Schedule.

The Sydney PMI chapter has a whole list of articles on Earned Schedule, which, if you're not familiar with it, introduces "duration" into the mix to give better schedule data and facilitate more accurate predictions than traditional EVM.

Here's another good writeup, from Ray Stratton, of Management Technologies (it's a PDF, so you'll need the Adobe reader, which is free from Adobe.com).

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posted by Jerry Manas @ 10:01 PM, Read More...  
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2 Comments:

At 10:56 PM, Anonymous Garry L. Booker said...

I once heard a true story that a frustrated executive told his project management staff that the next person who told him a schedule variance in dollars would be fired! Of course, this was an "over the top" reaction to the cost-centric methods of EVM. But it does point out that project communication must consider the receiver's frame of reference. Using units of time to measure schedule variance and predict the time of completion makes great sense, and I applaud my fellow-Oklahoman Walt Lipke for inventing it. Earned Schedule also solves the incredible problem of a project with a 0.95 SPI (which is "Green") but completion is 18 months late. But there is a problem. Earned Schedule is still a heavily analytical method of communication, and requires training, a LOT of new acronyms, and some new analyical languge: "Our actual time (AT) is 8 months but have only earned 6.5 months of schedule." Talking like analysts is already a major obstacle in more projects adopting EVM.

I'll try to work this week on a post that shows how Earned Schedule can be communicated to anyone -- without any acronyms.

/Garry Booker
www.projectfrontier.com

p.s. EVM was invented as a cost-control technique. Unfortunately, EVM was not invented primarily as a tool to accomplish priorities, second to manage schedule, and third to manage cost. This is the true order of priority for just about any project, and for organizational project management capability. (See an earlier post on this topic.) If it had, Earned Schedule wouldn't be correcting for EVM's shortcomings today. But hindsight is always 20/20.

 
At 9:39 PM, Anonymous Kym Henderson said...

Earned Schedule and EVM are unashamedly analytical techniques FOR ANALYSING A PROJECTS COST, SCHEDULE AND TECHNICAL PERFORMANCE STATUS from which predictive indicators of future performance can also be derived.

How this analytical information is communicated to management should be a separate exercise that considers the “receiver's frame of reference”, level (or lack) of knowledge in project management (let alone EVM and Earned Schedule), their role and stake in the project and the level of detail the receiver requreis to meet their needs.

For communicating cost status using EVM this can be reasonably straightforward. "Our cost variance to date is an adverse -$7.50. This means that if the project’s current cost performance continues to completion, our likely cost at complete with be $25.00, a cost overrun of $5.00. Actions we are taking to improve our performance are ..."

Using Earned Schedule, "our schedule variance (time) to date is an adverse –1 month. This means that if our current schedule performance continues to project completion, our likely completion date will be 31st December 2006, a delay of 3 months. Actions we are taking to improve our schedule performance are ... "

Without Earned Schedule a similar summary for schedule status was simply not possible. (Dates and costs are all notional).

While Earned Schedule does introduce new terms and acronyms, a considerable amount of effort has been spent making sure that these concepts and terms parallel the EVM terminology for costs to minimise the learning curve involved.

 

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