Skip to main content

Author: Kiron Bondale

Avoiding Potholes on the Road to Earned Value

Written by Kiron Bondale on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Avoiding Potholes on the Road to Earned Value

You will be hard pressed to find a person that has taken some project management training who has not drunk the purple Kool Aid called Earned Value Management (EVM). You may have run into EVM “evangelists” at project management conferences or symposiums. You can recognize them by that glassy stare that comes from rolling up one too many work package cost calculations and you may have even learned to run for the hills when they have cornered some neophyte who expresses ignorance about the whole concept or (worse) challenges its practical applicability.

All joking aside, with the emphasis placed on EVM’s benefits, you may be inclined (or coerced) to apply it to your next project. To help you avoid some of the more common beginner pitfalls with use of EVM practices, here are three tips:

  1. Consistent progress reporting on tasks or work packages is crucial. If you do not set expectations about standards for progress reporting across your project work packages (or even worse, in a portfolio/program situation, across the different projects that you are overseeing), rolled up value calculations will magnify these inconsistencies. Whether you want to be a purist and accept only 0 or 100% (good luck “selling” that in most organizations!) or see the world in a few limited shades of grey (0, 25, 75, 100%), ensure that there is consistent progress reporting to ensure that you can do an “apples to apples” comparison between project, sub-projects, or work packages.
  2. Be aware of non-critical paths. If you have team members that are neglecting critical path activities but have completed multiple high value non-critical path activities, you could end up with favorable schedule variance calculations even though you are behind on the critical path. I recall a project where team members spent a significant amount of time on non-critical path work packages and the project manager reported favorable schedule performance far past the point where the end date was in serious jeopardy. This is where you may want to consider doing a separate set of earned value calculations focused on critical path activities or at least do not use schedule variance as the sole metric for evaluating schedule performance.
  3. Be aware of cost imbalances between one-time costs (e.g. capital expenditures) and ongoing costs (e.g. labour or consulting fees). Similar to the previous point, if one time costs occur earlier or later than originally planned, cumulative cost data could negatively impact the accuracy of variance calculations. Variances in these one-time costs can also “mask” performance issues. If a computer server is much cheaper than was originally budgeted, the cost savings could hide poor labour productivity or performance on another work package. As much as possible, separate one time costs so that you can get a more accurate performance picture.

Earned Value Management IS a recognized best practice for objectively assessing project cost and schedule performance, but, as Ben Parker would say, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

What do you think? You can reach me with feedback at [email protected] or visit our website (http://www.solutionq.com)

Lessons Learned; Avoid the Oxymoron

Written by Kiron Bondale on . Posted in Articles.

We’ve all been there – you’ve just completed a significant project, you assemble the remaining members of the project team (those that are still sane), the sponsor (if one exists) and the other stakeholders (those that still like you) and you conduct a post-project review. You dutifully ask each participant to think back over the lifetime of the project (which sometimes feels like the lifetime of the participant) to elicit any useful information that could be applied to future similar projects. You capture these lessons “to be learned” in a document and archive the document (similar to the Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones movie) knowing that it will never be seen by human eyes again.

So what went wrong? Here are just a few of the challenges with the traditional approaches to lessons learned:

  • Conducting an effective “lessons learned” session at the end of the project requires that participants have photographic memories or have logged “candidate” lessons throughout the project lifetime in preparation for closeout. Both are unlikely, so only a superficial collection of lessons is possible.
  • Document-centric approaches to capturing lessons discourages project teams from searching or reviewing this valuable information when planning projects. Even if the lessons learned documents are stored in a centralized document management system, the manual effort of opening and reviewing individual documents is a barrier to their use.
  • Lessons are in many ways like risk events – if they are too general, too stale, or non-actionable, then their value (and credibility in the lessons learned process) is lost.

So what can you do to improve this situation?

  • Make it extremely easy for people to submit lessons learned and incent them to submit them over the lifetime of the project. Perhaps you can spare 5-10 minutes at every second project status meeting to capture these lessons.
  • Take a data-centric approach to lessons learned instead of a document-centric one – setup a simple online process to capture or search for lessons as individual items. Make sure that submitted lessons can be tagged with such useful information as the project description, the date of the lesson, the person that submitted it, and key words to locate them.
  • Institute a regular scrubbing process to weed out obsolete or irrelevant lessons from the lessons repository and to add clarification or key words for the valid or useful ones.
  • Add a “usefulness” flag to the lessons items (similar to the “Did you find this solution useful?” query that most product support organizations use on their online support sites) to identify the lessons that have been the most valuable and to help weed out the ones that are not that useful.

Like any other improvement initiative, applying these recommendations will take time, but as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I invite your feedback and you can reach me at [email protected]. Our website is (http://www.solutionq.com).