Microsoft® Office Project 2007 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Reviewing Your Budget

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

✓	The basics of Earned Value fields
✓	Examining cost variance
✓	Using Physical % Complete or % Complete in Earned Value calculations

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After you save a baseline for your project, assign resources with costs to tasks in your project, and complete some work on the project, you can begin to analyze the progress of your project based on the costs that you incur — or the Earned Value of your project.

Project managers use Earned Value information to measure the progress of a project based on the cost of work performed up to the project status date. Project calculates Earned Value by comparing your original cost estimates to the actual cost of work performed to show whether your project is on budget. This chapter explains Project’s Earned Value fields and shows you how to compare budgeted to actual costs.

The Basics of Earned Value Fields

Earned Value fields in Project are currency fields, and Project uses acronyms to represent the various Earned Value fields in tables, but three Earned Value fields are at the heart of the analysis when Project calculates Earned Value:

• BCWS (Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled): Measures the budgeted cost of individual tasks based on the resources and fixed costs that are assigned to the tasks when you schedule them.

• BCWP (Budgeted Cost of Work Performed): Indicates how much of a task’s budget should have been spent given the actual duration of the task. For example, suppose that you have ...