Preface

Do you have an earned value management system in place? Do you need to have an earned value management system in place? Are you thinking about adding earned value management to your project management controls? The Earned Value Management Maturity Model® (EVM3®) will lead you from a simple earned value management implementation, to one that meets earned value management standards, to one that operates very effectively at minimal cost. No matter whether you have used earned value management for years or are just trying to get started, this book can help you get to the next step in earned value management implementation. It shows you how to create a scaleable earned value management system that can evolve to meet earned value management system standards and government-directed earned value management implementations.

Whether you need to address the ANSI/EIA 748 standard or just improve the data coming from your earned value management system, the Earned Value Management Maturity Model will help you get where you want to be. This book will also help you to decide if earned value management is the right tool for your project or organization to use to monitor cost and schedule performance.

Earned value management has been a project management best practice for over 30 years. It is the best tool to monitor project cost and schedule performance. Yet it remains a relatively unused practice in most industries and projects. This book will show you how you can implement earned value management very simply and very quickly. It will also show you how to add robustness and accuracy to an existing earned value management system to get increasingly better cost and schedule data for project management decision-making. Finally, it will show you how to optimize your earned value management system.

The U.S. ANSI/EIA Standard 748 defines 32 guidelines for earned value management. Do you need to meet all 32 guidelines to perform earned value management? The answer is “No.”

The Earned Value Management Maturity Model will show you which of the 32 guidelines you must meet to perform basic earned value management. As your organization moves up the maturity model, you satisfy additional guidelines. At Level 3 you are compliant with ANSI/EIA 748, but you can go much further. EVM3 Level 4 and EVM3 Level 5 guide you toward optimizing the value of the earned value management system so that project managers receive the most timely and the best cost and schedule information at minimal cost.

This book has two parts. Each part is independent of the other. Part I discusses earned value management concepts, principles, terms, and analysis tools. If you are not familiar with earned value management this part of the book will give you the theory of earned value management, its terms, and its analysis products. Part I also contains the first textbook discussion of Earned Schedule. If you are not familiar with the new Earned Schedule parameter, you should at least read Chapter 2. Part II presents the Earned Value Management Maturity Model. Part II covers the five levels of the maturity model and what is expected at each level of capability.

Until the last decade, most of the knowledge of earned value management was contained within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) project management directives, policies, and contracts. Until the mid 1990s any books about earned value management focused on the DoD formal implementation and its related complexity. This very formal earned value management implementation was justified by the taxpayers’ investment in cost reimbursable contracts worth billions of dollars. Prior to about 1995, most textbooks described what appeared to be a complex, multidimensional, expensive, and bureaucratic way of managing projects. Unfortunately, any potential user who read one of these books looking for a new project management tool would be discouraged from applying earned value management.

Late in the 1990s, more industries, companies, and nations began to see the value of earned value management. A few books were published that provided simplified explanations of earned value management. One key document that helped the spread of earned value management was the ANSI/EIA 748, “Earned Value Management Systems.” This document brought into the public domain the concept of earned value management as used by DoD. However, the 32 guidelines in the ANSI/EIA 748 standard still required a significant investment in training and processes. Unless the project was very large or the organization had previously practiced earned value management as a DoD contractor, why would anyone want to use earned value management?

The Earned Value Management Maturity Model helps make it possible to scale the implementation of earned value management for any size project, from a small team project to a multi-billion dollar program. Once you have earned value management data, and cost and schedule forecasts for your project outcome, you are back in control. You know where your project is headed.

Ray Stratton, PMP, EVP

Brea, California