Tracking Projects with Earned Value shows how a flexible dynamic model of a project can use earned-value metrics to handle the internal and external pressures that commonly affect projects. Beginning with the basics of modeling and earned-value analysis, the course shows how to produce a robust model of a project that incorporates traditional project planning, avoids excessive overtime, and corrects project behavior under severe stress.

Join Jack Nevison as he guides you through some of the key components of this model. During each 55-minute class, you'll learn the ins and outs of a model that captures the dynamics of projects and additional tips and tricks that he’s learned in more than 50 years of experience in the field. Each class is followed by a question-and-answer session with Nevison. Online access to these class recordings, sample models, handouts, and homework assignments is included.

Course Overview

Class 1: Dynamic Models and Earned Value: April 7, 2021

This class introduces the basics of traditional project earned-value analysis and the basics of dynamic models with multiple causes, multiple effects, and feedback behavior. The delay of entry learning is also explored, including how it is tied to the “desert of resources” at the end of the project.

Class 2: Basic Project Planning Review: April 14, 2021

We next look at the standard tools of a well-planned project: scope statement, work breakdown structure, Pert Chart, staffing histogram, risk plan, and scope change process. The careful description of each deliverable’s effort and schedule (and any possible latent errors that might not get noticed) is emphasized.

Class 3: Overtime, Unplanned Effort, and Staffing Pressure: April 21, 2021

The topics for this class include: How overtime can seriously impede a project’s real progress, how the common problem of optimistic planning leads to pessimistic performance, and how earned-value metrics can restore balance with an adjusted scope or schedule.

Class 4: Stressed Projects, Latent Errors, and Visible Earned Value: April 28, 2021

The pernicious effect of latent errors in the project’s deliverables is explored in this class. Late-discovered latent errors require reworked deliverables, increased actual costs, and delayed schedules. Undiscovered errors lead to visible earned value that projects false progress during the project. The model shows how the warped earned-value metrics can and do eventually recover the project, on or near their original schedule.