In this video, learn how to use earn value analysis tools to review the progress of your Microsoft Project 2013 project.

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Welcome back to our course on Project 2013 Advanced. In the previous section we looked at cost reporting. Towards the end of the section, I changed the schedule for the NFF website development to reflect the fact that a couple of tasks have had their estimates increased. Now when we looked at the cost reports as a consequence of these changes, we could see some increases in cost. But in general terms and particularly when you’re dealing with much larger and more complex projects than this one as the project progresses, it’s sometimes very difficult to work out how significant cost increases are, whether they’re associated with costs that are running away or whether they’re associated with making better progress than you’d planned, and there are various other associated issues that can often arise with larger and more complicated projects.

Now the tools that we’re going to look at in this section are the tools associated with earned value analysis and what these tools are basically about is saying given the particular point in the project how are things going really? Are we really ahead of schedule? Are we really over budget or under budget? And these tools together give us some very straightforward indicators and the associated reports that can really give us a good indication of how things are really going.

Now before we start to look at the tools for earned value analysis in Project 2013 in detail, I need to explain to you some of the requirements for it to work properly. You can make this incredibly complicated if you’re not careful and it’s actually relatively straightforward once you know how to interpret a few key terms. But let’s start with the basic requirements.

Requirement one is that you’ve actually assigned your resources and cost to your project. Earned value analysis doesn’t really work at all until you’ve done that. And if you’ve only partly done it or if you keep changing it because you didn’t do it right the first time rather than circumstances have changed as the project has progressed, then you’re going to be looking at some pretty much meaningless figures as you go along. So before you start expecting earned value analysis to tell you anything make sure that you’ve got your project in place, your resources assigned, and the other costs associated as well. These include things like fixed cost for tasks.
The second requirement which is closely associated with that one is that you’ve actually saved a baseline. You are going to be using comparison with baseline figures. Now if you take this particular project, the one we’re looking at now, the NFF website development project, at any point in time I may decide to save a new baseline; either an additional baseline or one to replace the original, because I may decide that my reference point needs to change to a new baseline. That’s absolutely fine, but you do need a baseline. At the moment, I’m going to stick with the original baseline for the project overall.

The third requirement is that earned value analysis does depend on you having done some of the work on the project. It’s basically comparing what has happened with what should have happened. So it’s only going to have any value at all when you’ve actually recorded that something has happened.

Now there’s one more thing to cover before we look at earned value in detail and that is percent complete. In order to explain this, I’m going to just open this up and we’re going to take a look at the tracking table. So I’m going on to View, Tables. Let’s look at Tracking. And you’ll see that there are two columns in the tracking table, percent complete and physical percent complete. Now at the moment physical percent complete says zero for everything.

Whereas for tasks that have started or indeed started and finished, we’ve actually got percent completes that are nonzero.
As a matter of course when Project 2013 is doing its calculations on how the project is going, it uses percent complete values based on how far through each task you are.

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