How to handle EV on cancelled tasks?

[Evan]

Hello,

I'm facing a situation in Project where I'm tracking the EVM for schedules
and come across a large number of cancelled tasks. I'm not quite sure how to
handle them to not artificially inflate or deflate the EV figures. I can
mark the tasks cancelled, but not mark them 100% complete, so no BCWP will
show up, or i can do the opposite. Either way it will make the Earned Value
look higher or lower (I suspect the PM wants me to make the EV look higher,
which leads to other suspicions, but that aside....)

Thanks for any help you can give!

 

[John]

Hello,

I'm facing a situation in Project where I'm tracking the EVM for schedules
and come across a large number of cancelled tasks. I'm not quite sure how to
handle them to not artificially inflate or deflate the EV figures. I can
mark the tasks cancelled, but not mark them 100% complete, so no BCWP will
show up, or i can do the opposite. Either way it will make the Earned Value
look higher or lower (I suspect the PM wants me to make the EV look higher,
which leads to other suspicions, but that aside....)

Thanks for any help you can give!

Evan,
It shouldn't be a matter of how the PM "wants the EV to look". In an EV
environment, cancelled tasks should be handled to reflect what really
happened. If no effort was performed on the task there will be no Actual
Cost. Depending on how formal your EV system, the budget allocated for
cancelled tasks may be re-allocatable to other "live" tasks. In other
words, depending on your corporate EV policies you may or may not be
able to simply delete the cancelled tasks from the plan and use the
budget elsewhere. However, if some effort was performed before the task
was cancelled, the Actual Finish date should reflect the date on which
the task was officially cancelled and the Actual Cost should reflect the
"sunk" cost up to that point.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[Rick]

Deleting tasks is problematic because the BCWS is still included in all
parent tasks, but there is no associated BCWP.

The only alternative I can come up with is to reset the work to 0 and
rebaseline the task. Then there is no BCWS and no BCWP.

If the task is in-process you could alternatively set the remaining work to
0 and rebaseline the task and mark it complete so that BCWS and BCWP are
equal.

In both cases when you rebaseline you need to make sure you check the option
to roll the changes up to all parent tasks.