Paul J. Solomon and Ralph R. Young
John Wiley, 2007
Paul J. Solomon and Ralph R. Young
John Wiley, 2007
ISBN 0-471-72188-3
Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk
Maybe as a requirements person you have never heard of Earned Value. Maybe you think it sounds like something that managers use, and you'd be right. Maybe you think it has nothing to do with requirements, and you'd be wrong.
Solomon and Young have put together a compact, clear, and very well organized book on Earned Value (EV). The prefix 'Performance-Based' is strictly unnecessary, as EV shouldn't mean anything else. However, there is a reason for the prefix: EV has been over-sold and mis-applied in some parts of industry. People have used EV as a totem, separating it from the obvious need to connect the measure with actual performance -- useful work done. The book's cover carries the equation PBEV=EVM+Quality, below the Cost/Schedule/Technical triangle, conveying the message that PBEV is a value-added application of EV. You could call that a return to EV's roots.
The basic idea of EV is to model and graph the money spent against the work actually done. This is far better than congratulating yourself for being ahead of the spending at month 7 of your project, without any idea how much progress has actually been made. That's not to say that EV has no subtleties, nor that it always gives the right answer. For instance, if a job gets stuck because you run out of paint after 19% of the surface is covered, and have to repaint everything when the new batch arrives, you have to restate the EV, and the 19% of the effort already spent is treated as negative -- a cost not a benefit. This is clearly realistic. Older approaches which said you were 19% along the way were seriously misleading, both in time and in cost terms.
This figure from the book shows the general
idea:
relating time, cost, and actual progress against requirements.
Like requirements engineering, then, EV is tightly focused on results. But this book is not of interest purely because of this analogy. In a welcome departure from project management tradition, the book interweaves chapters on EV with chapters on requirements. It's not the only book on management by requirements -- think of the Robertsons' Requirements-Led Project Management, say, or Ralph Young's own Project Requirements -- but it is the first to deal with the mechanics of project cost estimation and tracking in a concrete earned value framework.
The book begins as you'd expect with an overview of EV, followed by its principles and guidelines for its use. Chapter 3 then dives into the Product Requirements Baseline, ie what the EV is going to measure progress against. Common Sense! What a rare thing that is. The book then goes on to cover the need to maintain bidirectional traceability (ok, ok, you thought managers couldn't even spell that), progress towards meeting product requirements, planned values and budget, variance analysis, scenarios, level of effort, risk management, changes to performance measurement, agile methods, requirements and EV, application to software development, and supplier acquisition management.
In other words, this is a remarkably open and comprehensive book. It is further strengthened by detailed appendices, covering the fundamentals of EV (like the Figure above), guidance, Standards, Federal Acquisition Regulations, and worked examples.
This is a fascinating and valuable primer on EV for project managers who want to create practical and realistic measures of progress. That of course means being requirements-based; it also means understanding how to measure the right things, which is what EV is all about.
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