Earned Value Managements for Agile Projects

[editormt]

The Methods & Tools newsletter has released in its archive section the
article "Measuring Integrated Progress on Agile Software Development
Projects". Earned Value Management (EVM) is a well known project
management technique which measures the integration of technical
performance, cost and schedule against planned performance within a
given project. The result is a simple set of metrics providing early
warnings of performance issues, allowing for timely and appropriate
adjustments. In addition, EVM improves the definition of project
scope, and provides valuable metrics for communicating progress to
stakeholders. The information generated helps to keep the project team
focused on making progress. AgileEVM is a light-weight, and easy to
use adaptation of the traditional EVM techniques which provides the
benefits of traditional EVM in Agile projects.

http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=61

 

[Marty]

EVM adaptations which use some tangible measure to represent progress
have been around for a while so any new article on this is welcome.

I'd draw MSP users attention to custom fields. EVM calcs in MSP are
quite suspect due to quirks relating to where the current date and/or
status date are, particularly BCWS. Much easier and trustworthy way
to do EVM in project is to use a formula in a custom cost or number
field, ideally using milestones. This means a properly statused
schedule with a Baseline set can give quite good EVM reporting (via
Excel of course).