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(More customer reviews)This is the only book that I know of that is totally devoted to earned value project management.Before proceeding with a review I believe that a few facts about earned value project management are in order.
First, earned value project management has graduated from a tool that was little known outside of the Department of Defense contracting community to a mainstream project control tool. This milestone occurred when it became a part of the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).
Second, "earned value" is a misunderstood term.I have had clients who thought it was a consultant's trick to raise prices or hide the true costs of projects in a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Just the opposite is true - earned value is a proven, powerful tool with which to control project costs and schedules. If you use it any poor estimating from the project planning phase will become quickly apparent, allowing you to recalibrate the project before it gets out of control and cannot be salvaged. As an aside, I use a heuristic that boils down to:if you are 15% off cost or schedule by the time you are 15% into a project you will not recover using your original baseline.Earned value project management techniques will give you ample warning before you drift into an unrecoverable situation like that.
The authors have distilled thousands of pages of DoD instructions and guides and lessons learned from the inception of the Cost/Schedule Control Systems Criteria (C/SCSC)into a 141 page book that thoroughly covers the subject.The C/SCSC is where earned value was first defined in the late 1960s.
I like the way the book is structured.It starts with a brief overview of earned value, from where it came and how it finally managed to escape from the bureaucratic world of DoD to become an integral part of the PMBOK.This overview segues into a chapter titled Earned Value Body of Knowledge, which is where the book gets interesting.This is followed by seven chapters that step you through how to correctly plan, schedule and control projects based on earned value.
The key strength is the authors demonstrate how projects are traditionally planned and controlled, and the pitfalls of this approach.For example, using cost/funding where you get a budget, develop a spend plan and then attempt to determine a project's health by comparing the burn rate to the spending plan is like flying blind.Why? The cost components are not integrated with schedule components.This results in controls that will never reveal any relationship between budget and schedule, and is a big reason why projects too often have cost or schedule overruns.
By demonstrating problems with traditional approaches to project management the authors lay the groundwork for how to employ earned value to avoid these problems.They start by systematically stepping through a project, starting with scoping, followed by planning and scheduling.This material is excellent and on the mark. It introduces you to work breakdown structures, organizational breakdown structures, and how the two intersect to form control accounts (the authors use the term "cost account", but my background has instilled "control account" into my vocabulary).
Earned value really begins taking shape in chapter 7, Establish Project Baseline, where the book quickly picks up pace.While earned value is simple in concept, there are many subtle elements that usually become apparent only with experience.The authors highlight these subtle elements, such as examples of how to interpret interrelationships between planned vs. actuals of work, cost and schedule.They provide standard tools such as schedule and cost performance indices (SPI and CPI), and add new wrinkles, such as "to complete performance index" (TCPI), which is a powerful management tool that I only discovered a few years ago.
The best reason for reading this book is it will give you the tools and techniques with which to properly plan projects and prevent cost and schedule overruns. If you are pursuing the Project Management Professional certification this book is the best single source of information that I know of on earned value.Everything you need to know about earned value is packed into 141 pages of a book written by two renowned experts on this subject.
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Product Description:
"Earned value" is a project management techniquethat is emerging as a valuable tool in the management of all projects,including and, in particular, software projects. In its most simpleform, earned value equates to fundamental project management.
This is not a new book, but rather it is an updated book. AuthorsQuentin Fleming and Joel Koppelman have made some importantadditions. In many cases, there will be no changes to a givensection. But in other sections, the authors have made substantialrevisions to what they had described in the first edition.
Fleming and Koppelman's goal remains the same with this update:describe earned value project management in its most fundamental form,for application to all projects, of any size or complexity. Writing inan easy-to-read, friendly, and humorous style characteristic of thebest teachers, Fleming and Koppelman have identified the minimumrequirements that they feel are necessary to use earned value as asimple tool for project managers. They have also witnessed the use ofsimple earned value on software projects, and find it particularlyexciting. Realistically, a Cost Performance Index (CPI) is the samewhether the project is a multibillion-dollar high-technology project,or a simple one hundred thousand-dollar software project. A CPI is aCPI ... period. It is a solid metric that reflects the health of theproject.
In every chapter, Fleming and Koppelman stick with using simplestories to define their central concept. Their project examples rangefrom peeling potatoes to building a house. Examples are in roundnumbers, and most formulas get no more complicated than one numberdivided by another.
Earned Value Project Management-Second Edition may be thebest-written, most easily understood project management book on themarket today. Project managers will welcome this fresh translation ofjargon into ordinary English. The authors have mastered a unique"early-warning" signal of impending cost problems in time forthe project manager to react.--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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