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