PM Network - February 2015

Still, he says, organizations moving toward agile approaches must recognize a degree of unknown around future costs that might be unsettling at ;rst. “Adapting EVM to agile processes means that the baseline should be assumed to be more changeable than on a classic waterfall,” he says. “;at’s nothing to be afraid of.”

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Even simpler, organizations can use EVM or agile on a project-by-project basis, rather than trying to force a hybrid model onto everything. “If the project is something you know, then you can go ahead and safely use agile,” says Mr. Berkeley. “If it’s something newer that you haven’t done before or there’s a high risk, then I would use EVM.”

GUEST COLUMN / PROJECT PERSPECTIVES
Three EVM Mistakes
You Don’t Want to Make
MICHAEL HATFIELD, PMP

Mistake #1: Thinking It’s Bigger Than It Is One of the biggest and most common errors earned value management (EVM) practitioners make is failing to understand the exact nature of earned value. Earned

value is a method for processing data into usable cost
and schedule performance information. It also happens
to add a narrative of what happened in the project and
why. That’s it, folks.

Unfortunately, its erstwhile promoters have stretched and oversold it so far beyond its proper epistemological boundaries that it has taken on a whole host of negative connotations for failing to deliver that which it was never designed to produce.

Earned value is not (or, at least, shouldn’t be):

■ A way of differentiating between authentic and merely lucky project managers

■ An intellectual club that comes down on managers who disagree with project manager types

■ License to badger executives into setting up organizations that crank out strange-looking reports

■ Fodder for pseudo-management science quacks to de-
bate endlessly at conferences and association meetings
You see my point—once separated from its true