Earned Value Management Study: Is Your Organisation Ready for EVM?

The goal of this article is to encourage project managers to participate in an academic survey to help determine if an organisation is ready to apply earned value management to its projects. If you are interested in providing input into an assessment tool to help determine if an organisation is ready to apply earned value, please read on!

Earned value management is a project management technique with well over 100 years of history. The initial inception of earned value management was found on the factory floor during the 1890s. It is a quantitative project control technique that uses objective data to make data driven decisions. The technique eliminates the subjective interpretation and defines the current project status in both cost and schedule terms.

Earned value practitioners have recognised several benefits from earned value management systems including early warning indicators for troubled projects, predictors of final project costs, and objective assessments of project schedule and budget status. Despite the benefits found in implementing earned value management, the technique still lacks successful implementation in both private and public sectors.

The lack of success can be found in an organisation's overall readiness for earned value management. Organisations often struggle with their own project management maturity as they balance meeting business customer demands while trying to execute projects consistently across the organisation. In organisations with low project management capability, earned value management is a far too advanced concept that organisations not ready to adopt. In these organisations, defining the work as a project is a major accomplishment!

Determining EVM organisational readiness is dependent up on the existence of critical success factors. A previous doctoral study at George Washington University by Dr. Euhong Kim identified 40 critical success factors for earned value management implementation. Dr. Kim researched public and private organisations with successful earned value management programmes and developed an earned value implementation model. The model groups 40 critical success factors into four categories including the Project Environment/Organisation, the EVM Methodology, the EVM User, and the Implementation Process (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Kim's EVM Implementation Model

Over the past two years, in conjunction with Lawrence Technological University's Doctorate of Management in Information Technology programme, I've been developing an earned value assessment tool based on Kim's EVM implementation model. The research project's purpose is to develop an assessment tool and validate it within the project management community. The research project's proposition is EVM organisational readiness can be determined by building an assessment tool based on the EVM implementation model.

The assessment tool is in the development phase and needs project manager feedback to improve and validate the tool. The tool asks project managers to evaluate 10 statements for each of the 4 EVM critical success factor categories. Participants will need to provide an evidence rating (0-3) and a perception rating (0-3) on the statement's impact to determining EVM implementation success. All responses are confidential and participants can elect to be kept informed about the results of the study.

Your time and input into improving the assessment tool is greatly appreciated. As a project management community of practice, it is critical to incorporate real world feedback into the tool to effectively help other organisations assess their earned value management implementation readiness.

To take the EVM survey, please visit:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=f9k37hX_2fGr3mKoJ79Hz9sg_3d_3d

Andrew Makar is a doctoral candidate pursuing a Doctorate of Management in Information Technology at Lawrence Technological University. When he isn't working, writing, or drafting the next chapter in his dissertation, he's found playing with his kids and learning the occasional card trick or two. Andrew writes Andy Makar's Blog  promoting better project management today.

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