An Editorial Observation
This issue of the PM World Today started us thinking about the long journey of Earned Value as a valuable and credible project management method. Our Feature Paper by Wayne Abba "How Earned Value Got To Prime Time" reminded us of the arduous journey to acceptance of a simple and concise concept for providing project structure and visibility. We thought about the twists and turns that the Criteria approach of Earned Value Management Systems has taken over the past 30 years. And we wonder what happened along the way and why has acceptance of such a simplistic approach to describing a project and modeling the cost and schedule of a project had such a hard journey? We think that like all new management technology the life cycle of Earned Value can be summarized in three words hype, bust, reality.
To our mind the most unfortunate mythology of the early Earned Value was that it was somehow in a category separate and distinct from that of a project management methodology. When in fact it was introduced as a set of Criteria for a management system that embodied the essence of project management. That is, plan , allocate the work, schedule and cost the work and then work the plan seemed to be that which was urgently required to provide structure and management visibility to the work of a project.
The real issue is that people simply do not read the Earned Value Management System requirements. The basis of Earned Value is the prescription of a set of management control systems criteria. In the beginning these were defined as Cost/Schedule Control Systems Criteria (C/SCSC (circa 1967). If you read them carefully they lay out the criteria for a management control system that any respectable project management entity should aspire to. Unfortunately the Criteria became lost in the hype of those who wanted to market their approach to installing a management system that could be "C/SCSC validated". And much effort was spent, especially in the US DoD and other US Agencies to embed the Criteria in contractor project management control systems.
The Canadian Government issued a formal Canadian Standard for Cost/Schedule Control Systems in 1996. And accompanied this Standard with suggested reports for customer and contractor management review. Here some emphasis was given over to the application of Earned Value to small to medium sized projects which at the time was a departure from an insistence that the C/SCSC applied only to major, expensive and public undertakings.
The Earned Value remained a requirement of mainly US DoD contracts. This stranglehold was broken through two events. A more satisfactory management window was supplied through the deletion by the US DoD of the C/SPSC Standard which was replaced by a Guideline For Earned Value Management System. And the popularization of the method in the project management organization community with the publishing by the Project Management Institute of an extremely popular book (circa 2000) "Earned Value Project Management" by Quentin Fleming.
It is interesting that the first Project Management Institute College was the College of Performance Management now devoted to the advancement of the Earned Value System
With this issue of the Project Management World Today we have come full circle. Glen Alleman discusses the application of Earned Value to software development process and in particular Agile Project Management, the latest approach to harnessing the intransigent software development process. Wayne Abba leads off with an article that describes how Earned Value got to prime time and Bill Duncan and Wayne Abba discuss the question of Past as Predictor and Earned Value.
All this has taken more than 30 years. Was all this due to the early hype, then the bust and now the reality of application Earned Value Management Systems to conduct of projects?
Why did it take Earned Value so long to get into the project management mainstream ? We suspect that there were just too many who did not read the specification and chose to join the chattering class who just love to expound off the top of the head.
Editors Notes:
1.For more on Earned Value Standards see the PMFORUM's Standards Section
2.A comprehensive bibliography of EVM literature is available on the web
at
http://www.pmi-cpm.org/