Performance Based Earned Value

August 20, 2008 · Filed Under Estimating, General, Project Management  - 1 Comment(s)

It has been very interesting reviewing Paul Solomon’s Performance Based Earned Value.  It is in many ways consistent with SEER’s monitoring and control.  It preaches looking at quality in addition to quantity of work performed as well as capturing the issues of deferred functionality.   I should point out that we sometimes called SEER’s Monitoring & Control Performance Based Earned Value before we realized it was trademaked.  Since we have stuck with 4 dimensional earned value for SEER.

PBEV has 16 guidelines in addition to the 32 included in the EIA 748 earned value standard. 

Paul’s website is very interesting and his concepts can mitigate many problems of IEA 748 earned value.

As someone who used earned value as a root level management technique I have often worried about organizations using earned value just to track quantity of work.  And i have been concerned about lack of risk considerations.  That is why SEER’s Monitoring and Control (AKA PPMC) uses 4 dimensional earned value for software, looking at effort vs progress, schedule vs schedule progress  defect insertion vs removal, scope growth.

Paul also speaks of taking a negative earned value when project difficulties are discovered and ways to handle deferred functionalty.  His approaches can really make a difference.

Paul says the base content is on his web site.  But I  still recommend his book .

PS: It seems there is a tradition in DoD projects that the cost people and earned value people don’t communicate sufficiently.  This is a tragedy since earned value needs the information from the cost people and the cost people need the data from the earned value people.  Many say that earned value fails most often from an unachievable plan… that plan is (hopefully) based on the estimate.

 

 


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Related posts:

  1. Galorath Article “applying Earned Value Management To Software Intensive Programs Part 1
  2. Applying Earned Value Management to Software Intensive Programs Part 4
  3. Galorath Article “Applying Earned Value Management To Software Intensive Programs Part 2
  4. Applying Earned Value Management to Software Intensive Programs Part 3
  5. Improving Earned Value With Statistics

Comments

One Response to “Performance Based Earned Value”

  1. Bryn on August 21st, 2008 7:42 am

    A tangential but very interesting link from Paul’s presentation is the DACS (DoD Data & Analysis Center for Software, another repository of information and best practices.
    https://www.thedacs.com/

    More directly related to PBEV is the integration of EV and Cost I’m experiencing now – and the integration of EV and scheduling. The EV analysts examine the schedule for planned vs actual completion (Baseline Execution Index), which can be done weekly, and forms a leading indicator for the EV cost report. I discuss those at the same time as I present SEM results.

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