97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

Chapter 73. Can Earned Value and Velocity Coexist on Reports?

MA, PHR, PMP. Barbee Davis

SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS ARE INCREASINGLY CERTAIN that a more agile, flexible approach to creating software is the best way to produce high-quality, working features that solve customer problems and provide business value. However, project management offices (PMOs) are continuing to develop procedures and train project managers on more traditional approaches that work successfully in many non–information technology areas of the corporation.

Is there a way to blend the reporting between the two factions, so that upper management can have matching metrics from both areas? Yes. Sort of.

If you are new to earned value, it is a numeric tracking of progress and the business value of that progress on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. In an over-simplistic explanation, ignoring the cost factors, the project manager (and other stakeholders) define requirements and estimate the amount of time it will take to do the work of the project. These estimates are converted into a schedule.

Let's say the reporting time period was one week and the project team estimated it could do 40 predefined tasks in that week. Friday afternoon, the team reports its actual progress. If it got all the tasks finished in those 40 hours, it "earned" 40 hours worth of value (EV). It had estimated, or planned, 40 hours' worth of value ...