6.5 Understand key challenges in the effective use of earned value - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->The challenge that we face when a project is ongoing.</v> The challenge we face is recognizing that planning the stuff that you did early on in the project was critically important and really mattered, really made an enormous difference in terms of the overall project's progress, and what we're gonna do with it. But once the project kicks off, once it starts getting undertaken, once the wheels are turning, as the project manager, our role certainly doesn't stop there. In fact, in many ways, although there was a lot of work associated with scope management and developing those plans, and creating our schedules and our budgets, and all those plans necessary to initiate the project, once the project is now ongoing, our challenge doesn't minimize, it shifts gears. So we're moving now in different directions. We still have to get the hard work done. But now our hard work consists of changing our focus from a plan focus to a monitoring focus. Changing our focus from a conceptual focus to one of paying attention to the actual work being done and getting updates, and assessing those updates and making sure that we don't necessarily take people's word at face value. I'm not saying they're deliberately lying, I'm just saying be comfortable with this. Make sure that the numbers you are getting from your subordinates are numbers you're comfortable taking forward to your boss, because at some point, if there's a discrepancy between the two, you are the person on the hot seat. Yes, you can say, well, they gave me bad data, but the boss is only gonna look at you and say, "Why did you accept it? Why didn't you dig deeper?" So we have to understand the challenge here in planning and controlling projects is an incredibly critical skill set that we have to develop, that we have to constantly update and nurture. So for example, for some of you who work in companies right now where your entire control system consists of receiving exception reports once a month or once every two weeks or whatever, basically saying, here's what was supposed to happen, here's what did happen. There's an exception here and here's how I'm dealing with it. You're probably a little bit in a fog. You really may not have very good information on how the product project is going. Likewise, if your whole approach here is just sitting at your desk and and updating a tracking Gantt, or updating your S-curves and tracking spending, you have some reactive information here, but it's not gonna help you going forward. It's not gonna help you fix the problems or understand the status as we move downstream. Earned value does this. For those who have used earned value, you probably don't need me selling you on the value of this technique. For those who maybe haven't considered it or have been very frustrated with the techniques you have in hand, this one is going to go a long way toward giving you alternative means to do a much better job of tracking the status of your project at any point in time. So I urge you to take some advantage of earned value. Try it out. You do a simple example like I did, maybe dig back to a project you've been involved in and just pull up and create a time phase budget for that two or three months. Take a look at what was done within that time period. Try and come up with some reasonable assessments of percentage of work completed in that period of time, and then create your earn value. See how that really correlates with what ultimately happened with that project, and I think you'll find earn value is a much more accurate and much more user friendly way, not only to see where we are now, but to predict where we're going. Doing project control, valuation and control, doing it right means that I have to understand principles for these different techniques. I have to be willing to commit my time to these techniques in terms of oversight, and I have to constantly practice these techniques, that all of these working together are going to give me a means by which I can become a much more accurate evaluator and controller of my projects, and more importantly, much more valuable to my company because I'm the one person there who's able to provide them with accurate assessments of where we are and where we're going.