EVM (Earned Value Management) is a tried-and-tested way of managing project performance. But it has a reputation for being difficult to implement and hard to manage. If you’ve made the decision to implement Earned Value Management for project monitoring in your business, you’ll need to overcome a degree of healthy skepticism from your project management community.
Some of them will no doubt be highly supportive of your move to robust governance procedures. Others, perhaps less so!
That’s why securing the support of the team is an essential step before moving forward with an EVM implementation. And ‘support’ means more than the team members nodding when you say EVM is coming. We’re looking for active, participative support as that’s what any new change needs to work successfully.
Here are some ways to do that.
1. Lead By Example
Your actions determine the actions of the team. A comment like, “The boss says we’ve got to do Earned Value Management so let’s work out how we can do this thing,” can be far more detrimental than you realize.
Stay positive, and demonstrate that the executive support is there.
It’s no secret that people work on things that they believe have management support from the top level. Show that the support exists, whether that’s through sharing a presentation from a senior leader, or having them address the project management community, or some other way of showing that the move to EVM is an initiative the managers at the top of tree know about and care about.
2. Make It Part of The Journey
Oh, so yesterday it was Six Sigma. Today it’s Earned Value Management. Great.
EVM is part of a suite of portfolio maturity tools that will help you develop the capability to deliver successful projects time after time. But you don’t get there overnight. If it isn’t the right time to introduce EVM to your project toolkit, then delay it. There’s no rush to deepen your maturity levels, especially if moving too quickly will mean losing some of the rigour and support for the initiatives.
The introduction of EVM should be a natural progression that fits for your business right now. Getting the timing right helps you sell the initiative: it’s the next step on the journey, and it’s the tools that your project leaders need right now to help them make better decisions.
3. Make It Meaningful
Project managers don’t like producing reports for reporting’s sake. Don’t let EVM reports become another overhead in the month – a report that disappears over email and they never hear anything about it.
EVM is more than a set of figures to be crunched each month. It should be there to support decision making and help inform the business about the direction of the project. In other words, it should be useful.
Project managers and stakeholders should want to produce and use the reports because they know that they offer valuable information. This can shape a project, help you recover a project that is on track to fail and more.
Show your team that the output of EVM is meaningful data that will be looked at and acted on – and they’ll be more supportive of the time it takes to produce the reports in the first place.
4. Offer Training
Your team could be faced with a totally new vocabulary, new calculations, new reporting layouts. These are concepts that many of them (if not all) haven’t had to deal with in the past. You can’t expect them to pick it up by themselves.
Schedule time to train the team in what they need to know. That’s everything from the basic concepts through to how to use your project management tools to output the reports. Your PMO team might need even deeper levels of training to help them troubleshoot issues and support the project management teams.
Make sure that your training plan includes everyone – the list of relevant stakeholders for EVM can be significant. Different groups will need to understand different elements, and there might be some pre-requisite training required for some as well, like how to create a work breakdown structure.
Once understood, EVM is not complicated. However, getting to the point where you understand what you are doing and what the output represents is a learning exercise. Help your team get there as quickly as possible by fully supporting them with training.
5. Give It Time
When leading a piece of transformative business change, you’d allow time for new ways of working to embed, wouldn’t you? You’d offer support over the months following the go live to make sure that the team didn’t slip back to their old habits. You’d reinforce the message, provide top-up training and generally do whatever is necessary to make this change feel like ‘the way we do business around here’.
That’s the same approach you should take for your project management community: introducing new tools and techniques for them to use does take time to become business as usual.
Sometimes this is overlooked. Project teams are great at delivering change to other people, but poor at doing it to themselves. They don’t allow enough time for communication or troubleshooting, and expect the individuals concerned to pick up new skills overnight.
That isn’t how you’d expect them to run a major project in your business, so plan your EVM implementation so that doesn’t happen. You can even appoint an EVM project manager to oversee and manage the successful implementation of the EVM framework into the teams! Treat it like a project, as you would any other change, and the team will take it more it seriously and get more out of it through the structured approach.
Earned Value Management can add such a lot of value to your business, and it’s something that you want to implement successfully. There every possibility of that, if you gain buy in from your executive team as well as the people on the front line working with schedules and activity lists every day.