Beware of the Five Points of Failure for an EVMS

Does your organization have a successful EVMS running already?  If you answered “yes”, how can you tell it’s truly successful?  You already know that success is not as simple as collecting data and reporting every month.  Success also means using the data to make decisions and course correct the project when needed.  However, even if you’re using your EVMS appropriately, it doesn’t mean it isn’t sick.  Perhaps your EVMS is diseased and you don’t even know it, until it begins exhibiting symptoms later down the road.  What went wrong?  How can you tell if your EVMS is diseased when all appears to be going well?

If your contract requires a certified EVMS, then you have one powerful weapon in your arsenal to fight an insidious disease that could cripple your EVMS.  In fact, having a customer require a successful EVMS is perhaps one of the greatest vaccines against a diseased system.  However, if you aren’t required to have a certified EVMS, or if you’ve contracted an EVMS infection, your system can still get very sick and die.  Let’s take a look at five major illnesses that can cause your EVMS to fail:

1. Management isn’t driving your EVMS.  The lack of passion and commitment to a strong EVMS by management is the number one virus I see in sick systems.  No matter how much effort you’ve put into your EVMS, you can still end up with a slow, flesh-eating virus in the form of senior management’s lack of commitment.  Let’s face it, a successful EVMS needs to be driven by management; they are leading the show and they have the ultimate power.  It’s a corporate culture issue, and one that needs to be corrected, pronto!  Symptoms of this virus include: management doesn’t understand the EVMS, see its value, use it for decision making, appreciate its difficulty and complexity, take it seriously, or give it appropriate time/resources to implement and maintain, etc.  If management does not drive it, then it will be seen as an “add-on”; something that is only for show.  It won’t be used to manage projects, and it becomes only something that generates pretty pictures, or perhaps just something those project controls folks make you do.  This virus is so rampant and destructive in some organizations that I encourage you to check out How to Get Management to Not Only Buy-In to EVM, but Drive It…

2. Your EVMS cannot generate useful data.  Despite spending gobs of time and money designing it, sometimes the EVMS doesn’t yield useful information.  This mistake is like the common cold; you can function for a while, but if you don’t tend to it, you’ll end up in worse shape.  You’ll know you’re in this situation if you’re doing too many things manually, or having to change key elements—such as the WBS—in mid stride.  The cause of this common problem includes choosing the wrong EVM software for your needs, lack of focus on integration of systems when designing the EVMS, and hiring the wrong people to implement and run the EVMS.  If you find yourself in this situation, it’s time to stop and fix it before it becomes a bigger problem.  At this point, you may wish to hire an outside firm to assist, because clearly, the people who designed and implemented your current EVMS were not totally successful.  Sometimes that is due to internal conflicts and an outside firm can have more clout with internal stakeholders.

3. Mid to lower level management and CAMs don’t support or accept the EVMS.  While this is related to item #1, it is in a class by itself as well.  Even if senior level managers drive EVMS, if your organization is too top heavy, you may end up finding that the message from senior management is watered down by the time it reaches the trenches.  If you have a manager that doesn’t take the EVMS seriously, or even degrades it, you’ve got a real problem on your hands.  This is the kind of person that can “infect” others with their mentality by constantly complaining about the EVMS.  They are the cancer of your EVMS.  These folks may see it only as a necessary evil, and certainly nothing that will make their management skills any better.  They fear getting caught in their lack of performance and tend to blame the system.  They need to be removed from this position as soon as possible.

4. Your EVMS begins dying a slow death and momentum is lost.  You’ve just won a new contract and everyone is running around like a chicken with their heads cut off in order to get the EVMS up and running, and certified.  The whole team is running on adrenaline and it seems everyone is excited for a while and then….the focus begins to shift.  Some people quit, new people come in, time goes on, and eventually the EVMS is running on autopilot.  It feels old and stale.  However, this also points back to issue #1.  Why?  Well, if senior management was really passionate about it and used the information in the EVMS to make decisions, then it would stay at the top of everyone’s priority list.

5. The critical users of the EVMS are inexperienced and untrained.  I’ve witnessed the disaster caused by organizations that hire the wrong people to design, implement, and maintain the EVMS.  Hiring an accountant to run the EVMS isn’t going to work!  Earned value isn’t an overly complicated concept, but there are plenty of complex problems that can arise from various scheduling elements, settings in the EVM software, calculations to understand, etc.  Then there are plenty of CAMs who don’t understand how to write variances, as well as managers who can’t read a project status report or IPMR.  There are so many variables that can affect the data—so be sure you have people who understand it forwards and backwards.  The EVMS cannot survive when the inputs, outputs, and users are lacking.  It’s the equivalent of having pneumonia.  So find an EVM software that is user-friendly and can integrate with your other systems, write procedures that make sense, and then train, train, train!  

Half the battle is in knowing that you have a problem.  So take some time to really assess the health of your EVMS and make changes where needed—before it dies a slow death.  And if you have had any experience with these diseases, or any others that have killed an EVMS, please leave a comment below!  Next week we will take a look at The Alternative to Earned Value Management, It’s Called “Being Fired!”

- Melissa Duncan (About Melissa)

Editors Note: We generally post twice a month, however for November and December we will be posting once a month and return to twice a month in January 2015.   

Read the previous posting - Finding EV Software with a Low PITA Factor

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Earned Value legend as there may be a few of us that don’t yet have this memorized…

CA=Control Accounts
CAM=Control Account Manager
CPI=Cost Performance Index
EAC=Estimate At Completion  

EVM=Earned Value Management

EVMS=Earned Value Management System
EAC=Estimate At Completion 

IPMR=Integrated Program Management Report
LOE=Level of Effort
OBS=Organizational Breakdown Structure
OTB=Over Target Baseline
PC=Project Controls
PM=Project Manager
PMB=Performance Measurement Baseline
RAM=Responsibility Assignment Matrix
SPI=Schedule Performance Index
WBS=Work Breakdown Structure

Finding EV Software with a Low PITA Factor

There is really only one thing you need to keep in the forefront of your mind when looking for EV software with a low PITA factor.  

It’s the same thing that has made the Apple iPhone hugely successful, despite all its competitors.   However, when we begin listing the requirements for our EV software, sometimes we lose sight of the one thing that is going to make or break the success of the software you thought was going to make your life easier.  We start focusing on all the bells and whistles and we begin dreaming of a future with all this wonderful information about our projects—if we buy this really cool software.

Can you guess what it is yet?  If you ask a devoted Apple iPhone user why they love their

cell phone, you’ll likely hear about the iPhone “experience” or perhaps the friendly and intuitive user-interface.  Boil it down in a nutshell and the answer becomes “ease of use” via the simplistic design.  Sure there are others that have more features, yet the iPhone has a very loyal following that its competitors can’t break.  Keep that in mind.

What does that really mean when we talk about EV software?  It is a much broader concept than you might initially think.  It transcends every item on your list of software requirements.  Let’s take a look at some of the requirements you may have for your EV software and consider some ease of use aspects that may make a huge difference in your work life.

1. Robust enough to handle thousands of activities and resources.  OK, so you have some humongous schedules with a massive listing of resources.  If your software is too cumbersome to operate, it doesn’t matter if it could handle billions of activities.  Cumbersome EV software either takes an army to manage, or a lot of time for those few people who understand how it works.  That’s going to cost you time and money, and possibly some very burned out resources.
2. Fast processing and reporting.  Even if it takes only one second to process your data or produce a report, what were the steps or headaches required beforehand?  How many different screens or options do you have to go through before you get to that lightning speed?  Even if there were NO prior headaches and your software is insanely fast, I guarantee if it is too difficult to understand or use after the fact, you'll be grumbling.
3. Reliable information.  Granted, if the information within and generated by your EV software is fraught with errors, you’re going to chuck it out the window pretty quickly.  Most of the time this is caused by “dirty” information going in to the system, or by various settings within the software that affect how the data is processed or reported.  But, let’s say it is doing something to your data—similar to autocorrect or auto-formatting—anything that you don’t want and you can’t turn off….then you’ll be beating your head against a brick wall, because frankly, that will be LESS painful.  This includes putting data in places you don’t want, such as the wrong period or at the wrong level of the WBS.  You’d be surprised how often this happens.  If you hear, “UGH!  Why is it DOING that??!!”, then that’s a good indication that you’ve got an ease of use problem affecting the reliability, or at least the usability of your data.
4. Useful reporting and charts.  Perhaps you desire reports and charts that don’t require some third-party software to generate them.  Eliminating additional software needed because your current EV software doesn’t yield reports you can use is a common reason for wanting new EV software.  But even if it does produce wonderful reports, how easy was it to generate them?  How difficult is it for project managers to access and run a report for themselves?  If you DO need to load it into a third party software, how hard is it to set up the interface, or is it all done manually?

So the next time you go looking for software to make your life easier, make sure it really does make it easier.  I know it sounds like such an intuitive and simple concept, but so many people lose sight of it.  And to help you even further, here is a list of questions you should ask when reviewing potential EV software programs:

• Does it take a small army to setup and run each month?
• Can anyone be trained to use it within one day?
• Is the software so complicated that the developers have created a setup or processing wizard?
• Do you have to enter the same data in more than one place?
• How many manual steps are created or eliminated by this software?
• Are other tools needed to analyze the data in the software, and if so, how many or how often?
• Is the data generated consistent across datasets and does it provide valuable, reliable project performance information?
• How many steps do you have to take to drill down into your data?

Do you have any other tips for finding easy to use EV software?  Or how about complaints of your existing software—how is it not so easy to use?  Check out our blog next time, when we will discuss the "5 Points of Failure for an EVMS."

- Melissa Duncan (About Melissa)

Read the previous posting - Right Sizing: A Common Point of EVMS Failure - Revisions and Data Maintenance"

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Earned Value legend as there may be a few of us that don’t yet have this memorized…

CA=Control Accounts
CAM=Control Account Manager
CPI=Cost Performance Index
EAC=Estimate At Completion  

EVM=Earned Value Management

EVMS=Earned Value Management System
EAC=Estimate At Completion 

IPMR=Integrated Program Management Report
LOE=Level of Effort
OBS=Organizational Breakdown Structure
OTB=Over Target Baseline
PC=Project Controls
PM=Project Manager
PMB=Performance Measurement Baseline
RAM=Responsibility Assignment Matrix
SPI=Schedule Performance Index
WBS=Work Breakdown Structure