Tracking Project Progress with Earned Value Management Metrics - A Real Case

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI) project management consists of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling resources such as time and cost in order to produce products with acceptable quality levels. As so, project managers must monitor and control project execution, i.e. verify actual progress and performance of a project with respect to the project plan and timely identify where changes must be made on both process and product. Earned Value Management (EVM) is a valuable technique for determining and monitoring the progress of a project as it indicates performance variances based on measures related to work progress, schedule and cost information. This technique requires that a set of metrics be systematically collected throughout the entire project. A consequence is that, for large and long projects, managers may encounter difficulties in interpreting all the information collected and using it for decision-making. To assist managers in this tedious task, in this paper we classify the EVM metrics distinguishing them into five conceptual classes and present an interpretation model that managers can adopt as checklist for monitoring EVM values and tracking the project's progress. At this point of our research the decision model has been applied during an industrial project to monitor project progress and guide project manager decisions. Copyright © 2015 SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications.