you want to make it,” says Mr. Ahmed. “;ere are portfolio management tools
that will allow you to simply add a percentage-complete ;gure and then calculate EV automatically. Even if you do not use portfolio management tools, you
can manage through milestones and attribute value to those. ;e key is to set it
up in line with what you’ll need to report to.”
AGILITY AND AGILE
;ere’s little question that EVM and organizational agility can coexist and even
thrive. What’s less clear is EVM’s role on projects that involve agile approaches. On
the surface, agile’s focus on adaptive planning and discovery-driven projects seems
ill-suited for EVM’s focus on the project plan. But EVM’s extensive documentation—another characteristic anathema to agilistas—is an important resource for
agile practitioners hoping to anticipate potential issues, argues Mr. Dimenza.
“EVM can help because of its great capacity to provide insight on historic
information and apply that on the known future,” he says. “Historic information always helps to detect good and bad patterns of execution and take steps to
pro;t from or correct them.”
Even if you do
not use portfolio
management tools,
you can manage
through milestones
and attribute value to
those. The key is to
set it up in line with
what you’ll need to
report to.”
—Shoaib Ahmed, Eagle Technology, Wellington,
New Zealand
