What's wrong with this picture?

(1) Earned Value Management (EVM) was invented by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) as an oversight tool for the defense industry.
(2) Industry now owns the American EVM standard, not the DoD.
(3) If any member of industry should have a handle on EVM in 2008 it is the DoD's largest contractor, Lockheed Martin.
(4) But "a large number of managers at Lockheed's military aircraft division [do] not understand or properly apply the guidelines." They don't understand or apply 19 out of the industry-standard 32 implementation criteria.
(5) "We can't continue to trust Lockheed with billions of taxpayer dollars or we'll end up with less bang for more bucks," said Nick Schwellenbach, the oversight group's national security investigator. "Affecting Lockheed's bottom-line is the only thing that can cause them to clean up their act."

What a mess! At the core of EVM is a very simple principle that should be applied to all projects -- even to very short iterations of any Agile methodology. That principle is knowing your "discrete intended outcomes" in advance (e.g., user stories, work packages, deliverables), and measuring your completion of those outcomes. Measuring completion of intended outcomes is the equivalent of measuring mileage with an odometer. It's that simple! Yet, Classic EVM is a bureaucratic mess that results in terrible press coverage, like this...

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN0231751320080603

If the DoD's largest contractor can get only 13 out of 32 EVM criteria right, what does that mean for EVM in commerical industry? Lockheed's customer knows and understands EVM, but commercial customers don't even know what EVM is.

We must recognize that Classic EVM is fundamentally flawed and must be rebuilt from the ground up. The new EVM foundation must be based on mastering a few core principles, like ALWAYS measuring completion of discrete intended outcomes. If we master the core principles on EVERY project, then the 32 criteria will be much easier to understand and apply. But if we continue to use the 32 criteria as our foundation, we will continue to have a mess.

/Garry