The Global Growth of Earned Value

Neste e-mail Advisor do Cutter Consortium, o consórcio Norte-Americano para a Gestão das Tecnologias de Informação, Alexandre Rodrigues debate a problemática do alinhamento contínuo das soluções TIC no apoio aos processos de negócio (i.e. o Busines-IT Alignment), à luz da disciplina emergente da Gestão de Programa.

Earned Value Management (EVM) and Earned Value Analysis (EVA) are terms increasingly familiar to the Project Management community, from team members to senior executives. I will use the term EVM throughout this article, as it provides a wider context for the application of this important technique.

Can EVM be just a temporary fad, or can it be a proven best practice that is here to stay, worth the attention of project oriented organisations? I will try to answer this question by looking at the international scene. From the US, where the technique was first introduce by NASA and the DoD back in 1962, to the UK, Portugal and Japan, it looks like EVM is catching the attention of a wide variety of working cultures around the globe.

The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK®), published by the Project Management Institute (PMI), and the basis of the internationally renowned project management professional certification – the PMP® – refers to EVM as “…the most commonly used method of performance measurement.” The key concepts underlying EVM are described in the PMBoK, and are translated into several languages. Around the globe, candidates for the PMP certification are thereby required to be familiar with this technique. Meanwhile, a national standard was recently developed in the UK by the Association for Project Management (APM), who also delivers a well-respected professional certification program. A best selling pocket-book from Steve Wake, the APM Earned Value SIG Chairman, is already available in French and German with the Portuguese translation underway. Japan has recently adopted this British standard as the working basis for their national standard. In Portugal, some of the largest programs ever executed with high public visibility, such as the multi-million Euros 1998 Lisbon World Fare and the currently underway Euro 2004 Program (football for those not so acquainted), have both found in EVM the tool of choice for their control system. Overall, it looks like solid roots have been established for EVM to grow and prosper as a best practice in the international scene.

However, despite these facts, great challenges are still to be faced. What are the needs that can really justify the implementation of EVM? How long can it take, and how much can it cost an organisational to adopt? What phases should this process follow? What are the risks, the solutions, and the success factors? These are questions that must be addressed up-front by any organisation considering the use of EVM. Unfortunately, lessons learned do not abound, at least publicly. In the remainder of this article, I will try to summarise some findings from the international scene. 

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