Earned Value Project Management

The reader that is familiar with Project Management Institute books will find it extremely useful and connected to real life. Presents Earned Value definition and how is possible to organize your projects based on Earned Value principles. If you're interested to have results oriented projects, or if you're interested in project performance, or project monitoring, this book is really helpful. I highly reccomend you to read and use it. If you like "not so academic" books, you might find it a little bit too condensed, and probably you'll need to search for something else. Microsoft Projects offers very good definitions of Earned Value, Cost Performance Index and Schedule Performance Index that you might learn as first steps.

As explained in Chapter 12, applying Earned Value concepts on projects in a publicly traded company may avoid legal problems surrounding accurate reporting of the financial situation of a company. This is because most projects if not completed could result in inaccurate financial reporting for a publicly traded company (if some form of performance measurement wasn't used while the project was in progress). It is interesting that this book was written before the accounting scandals of 2001-2002 and one of the few books that addresses this aspect. I don't know how much of the accounting scandals involved projects but I wouldn't be surprised if the SEC starts imposing stricter rules on the financial reporting surrounding projects in the future.This book is an excellent treatise on how to measure project performance from both a cost and schedule perspective. This is what Earned Valued Analysis is all about. The book never gets too complicated and is easy to follow the whole way (200 pages). A word of caution - this may be too much material to digest if you are trying to prepare for the PMP. Rita Mulcahy's PMP Exam Prep has enough information on Earned Value Analysis that will easily help you get through that section on the PMP exam. But as soon as you obtain your PMP certification, I would highly recommend making the mastery of the material in this book your next goal. The real payoff in applying the project management principles comes when you are able to measure the project performance on top of controlling project performance and presenting the results to your project sponsors.By the way, the concepts involved in Earned Value Analysis are extremely simple. It is amazing that so much control over your project can be attained by paying attention to the simple concepts of Earned Value, Planned Value, Actual Cost, and the related concepts of CPI and SPI. After setting up the project baseline to calculate these variables on a frequent basis, you are ready to control and predict the future of the project.The first four chapters of the book go into the overall concepts and the history of Earned Value. Chapters 5-10 address how to set up your project for fully utilizing the power of the Earned Value concepts - all the way from setting up the scope of the project to forecasting. Chapter 11 discusses how the concepts apply to the private sector and Chapter 12 deals with the legal implications.The authors are related to Primavera Systems (the leading provider of Project Management Software for the Engineering & Construction industries) either as CEO or consultant to Primavera. PMI used to recommend this as required reading to prepare for the PMP exam but I am not sure if they still do. In either case, I don't believe it is required reading. I tried to read it before the PMP exam and I couldn't digest the material because there was too much on my mind already. But now that I have passed the PMP exam, I have thoroughly enjoyed learning the concepts and apply

This is the only book that I know of that is totally devoted to earned value project management. Before proceeding with a review I believe that a few facts about earned value project management are in order. First, earned value project management has graduated from a tool that was little known outside of the Department of Defense contracting community to a mainstream project control tool. This milestone occurred when it became a part of the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).Second, "earned value" is a misunderstood term. I have had clients who thought it was a consultant's trick to raise prices or hide the true costs of projects in a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Just the opposite is true - earned value is a proven, powerful tool with which to control project costs and schedules. If you use it any poor estimating from the project planning phase will become quickly apparent, allowing you to recalibrate the project before it gets out of control and cannot be salvaged. As an aside, I use a heuristic that boils down to: if you are 15% off cost or schedule by the time you are 15% into a project you will not recover using your original baseline. Earned value project management techniques will give you ample warning before you drift into an unrecoverable situation like that.The authors have distilled thousands of pages of DoD instructions and guides and lessons learned from the inception of the Cost/Schedule Control Systems Criteria (C/SCSC)into a 141 page book that thoroughly covers the subject. The C/SCSC is where earned value was first defined in the late 1960s. I like the way the book is structured. It starts with a brief overview of earned value, from where it came and how it finally managed to escape from the bureaucratic world of DoD to become an integral part of the PMBOK. This overview segues into a chapter titled Earned Value Body of Knowledge, which is where the book gets interesting. This is followed by seven chapters that step you through how to correctly plan, schedule and control projects based on earned value.The key strength is the authors demonstrate how projects are traditionally planned and controlled, and the pitfalls of this approach. For example, using cost/funding where you get a budget, develop a spend plan and then attempt to determine a project's health by comparing the burn rate to the spending plan is like flying blind. Why? The cost components are not integrated with schedule components. This results in controls that will never reveal any relationship between budget and schedule, and is a big reason why projects too often have cost or schedule overruns. By demonstrating problems with traditional approaches to project management the authors lay the groundwork for how to employ earned value to avoid these problems. They start by systematically stepping through a project, starting with scoping, followed by planning and scheduling. This material is excellent and on the mark. It

This is one of the easiest to understand books on project management I have read! Quentin provides background and history for the Earned Value concepts and explains them in a simple and usable way. This book is a must read for project managers who need to really tell how their projects are doing! CSCS folks will learn how the system was supposed to work! Daniel Coza

Quentin and Joel have finally put this little known but historic managment tool in the hands of project managers everywhere. The authors have taken the time to strip away the traditional jargon associated with EVM (Earned Value Mgmt), and have put it in a context immediately useful to a wide range of projects. The techniques they have covered should help managers manage more effectively by giving them the tools to know where the real project problems are, predict future performance, and make hard decisions with factual data. Ray Stratton, President, Management Technologies, Brea, CA