Large-scale projects aren't the only ones to benefit from earned value management-small projects can take advantage, too.

by Jeffrey Bouley

Projects that are late or over budget—or worse yet, both—are never welcome sights, especially when huge investments are involved. That’s why project managers of mega projects often opt for earned value management (EVM), which combines technical, schedule and cost performance measurements in a single methodology to warn project managers and the project team of performance problems early in the life of the project.

At first glance, a formal EVM process—which took root in the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1960s and includes 32 criteria and weekly or monthly progress reports as laid out by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Standard 748-A—may be daunting for project managers who oversee projects of shorter duration or with smaller budgets.

But don’t write off the process. With a little customization, EVM can beneficial for projects of any size.

A Custom Fit
To make EVM work for smaller projects, the 32 criteria can be pared down to a more manageable 10, suggests Quentin W. Fleming, PMP, a project management consultant who works with Primavera Systems in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, USA.

“I’ve applied the EVM process several times,” he says, adding that smaller projects may not need all 32 criteria to give early warning signals.

Managers of smaller projects can consider these 10 steps:

1. Define work scope
2. Create an integrated bottom-up plan with detailed control action plans (CAPs)
3. Schedule formal CAPs
4. Assign each CAP to an executive for performance oversight
5. Establish a baseline that summarizes CAPs
6. Measure performance against schedule
7. Measure cost efficiency against cost incurred
8. Forecast final costs based on performance
9. Manage remaining work
10. Manage baseline changes

Scale down the process even further by using only criteria that suit your project’s needs. You might do this by focusing only on schedule variance instead of cost variance, suggests Raju Rao, PMP, principal consultant for Xtraplus Solutions, a Chennai, India-based project management consulting and training firm.

It’s All Relative
Is there a point at which a project is simply too small to benefit from EVM? Not necessarily, says Victor E. Anyosa, PMP, project management office officer of Power Generator El Platanal, Lima, Peru, who recently used EVM for a six-week project. EVM is useful for projects of all sizes, he says, if the project manager can accept a high level of strictness.

During the second week of work, his project fell a week behind. EVM told him he was 50 percent behind, while traditional methods would say he was about 17 percent delayed.  

“Some managers feel uncomfortable with the strictness of this (EVM) technique,” Mr. Anyosa says. “In the end, it is the decision of the company how strict it wants to be with the metrics of small projects. For me, it was quite helpful in keeping even a small project under control.”