Using VersionOne for Earned Value Management (EVM) Reporting
There has been a lot written on the relationship between Earned Value Management (EVM) and Agile Development (See References below). There is now functionality in VersionOne Analytics (part of the VersionOne Ultimate Edition) to pull key Agile metrics that support EVM and output them in a report. This post goes through one such report. You can use the Custom Reporting module in Analytics to create variations on this example. Note that the information in the report can be exported to Excel, CSV, and/or PDF.
Assumptions used in building the Report:
- All EVM information is at the Release level.
- Dates, Budget (or Budget at Completion- BAC), and Total Estimate (Planned Release Story Points= PRSP) baselines will be established at the beginning of the Release and fixed as much as possible.
- Percent Complete will be measured by comparing Open and Closed Story Points.
- Expected Percent Complete will be measured by comparing days elapsed versus total days for the Release.
- Costs will be computed using Effort. This might not work for all organizations as they might track this in a separate system.
Calculations in the Report:
- Planned Value (PV) = Budget * Expected Percent Complete
- Earned Value (EV) = Budget * Percent Complete
- Actual Cost (AC) = Total Done * Constant ($145/ hour)
- Cost Performance Index (CPI) = EV/ AC
- Scheduling Performance Index (SPI) = EV/ PV
- If Percent Complete is less than Expected Percent Complete, then the cell will be highlighted in Red.
The Resulting Report:
If you are interested in more information or a copy of the VersionOne Analytics Report Definition for this report, please contact me.
Here are a list of References on EVM and Agile:
- This article by Tamara Sulaiman introduced the concept of Agile EVM: http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-evm
- There is another article by Tamara on Agile and EVM: http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=61
- The VersionOne Community Site has an article on EVM Reporting and VersionOne: https://community.versionone.com/Help-Center/Common-Questions/Earned_Value_Management
- This is a whitepaper on Making Agile Work in a Government Contracting Environment, which mentions EVM prominently: http://www.niwotridge.com/PDFs/ADC%20Final.pdf
- This is an article on Agile and Earned Value Reporting: http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/agile_and_earned_value_reporting.pdf
- Here’s a post on Agile Charts: http://www.agilekiwi.com/earnedvalue/agile-charts/
This is still an emerging area within Agile and Project Management.
Please share your comments and questions below. Thanks for reading!
