Management Technologies will be conducting a Tools Track presentation at EVM World 2014 in San Antonio in May. We will be covering all the products and services we provide the EVM community. If you are attending the conference please consider attending our Tools Track presentation. One attendee will leave with a raffle prize.

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Where to find old Tidbits?

Since August of 2009 each EVM Newsletter has included a Tidbit to hopefully help make your EVM system work better, be less costly, or more accurate, or more timely. Until now the only index to previous Newsletters was by Month and Year. Not very useful since most Newsletter content is time sensitive. But the Tidbits are not.

So now all the Tidbits are available via a link that lists each topic or theme. The link is on all our web pages as well. 

The Government Manager's Guide to Earned Value Management by Budd and Budd (ISBN: 978-1-56726-439-5) was just published by Management Concepts, Vienna VA. The book is Volume 9 of their "Government Managers Essential Library"  growing list of books focused on topics for government managers.

Budd and Budd are two of my favorite authors in the area of EVM. In fact, A Practical Guide to Earned Value Project Management is one of my recommended study materials for the EVP exam.

The paperback, at eighty pages, plus appendices (32 Guidelines and an index) is a quick read. It will get the reader familiar with EVM terms and concepts, and EVM data analysis products.

This book is focused the knowledge needed by US Government Managers. While it summarizes the ANSI 748 Guidelines and the EVM principles, it really focuses on EVM as practiced through the policies, agencies, and regulations of the US Department of Defense. For example, there is a whole chapter on Industry and Government Connections that address the roles of OMB, OUSD/AT&L, PARCA, DCMA and DCAA among others. If you know what this alphabet soup means then this book is for you. If you plan to work within the US DoD community you should learn what these organizations do. If not, maybe this is not the EVM book for you.

One observation I made is that the title and back cover suggests the book is for any Government manager but the book's focus is really on how EVM is done within the US DoD. While many other US Federal Agencies adopt the US DoD approach, some do not. For managers who do not work within a DoD or DOD-like agency some of the discussion may be in appropriate. Chapters on "Implementation and Verification" and "Reporting, Compliance, and Oversight" are how the US DoD performs these functions. So this book may be applicable to you depending on how applicable the US DoD is to your EVM implementation.

I also feel that the weaknesses of EVM should have been discussed such as SPI always becoming 1 at project's end, and that the critical path still needs to be examined lest the BCWP (EV) results from doing non-critical work. There was no discussion of Earned Schedule as a possible alternative to the SPI becoming 1.

The book still may fill a void in your EVM "library". If your boss tells you that next week they want a briefing on how you will implement EVM on a DoD contract you can read this over the weekend and know a large part of what you will need to do.  After the briefing you will want to read Budd and Budd's other book on EVM to get the complete story on ANSI 748 and what it asks for and what it requires.

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EVPrep Exam Prep Workshop (14 PDUs)

The workshop covers all the topics likely covered in the exam and provides exam-like questions 

and workshop discussion about each question and the possible answers. This workshop also includes an EVM analysis question to help prepare you for the three page written essay in Part II (was part IV).

"Ray, your course is excellent preparation for the EVP Certification test. Your questions were comprehensive like the test and somewhat harder (more complex) than the real test. Your preparation course especially helped with the memo."

Jeff Kottmyer

NASA

Do you have an  EVP FAQ?  

Does our EVPrep workshop and/or EVP Study Guide really help with the EVP exam?

Using these data and data from AACE regarding yearly totals of EVP exams taken and exams passed we did some statistical analysis.

Yes, our EVPrep products are effective in increasing the likelihood of passing the EVP exam.

Earned Value Experience (CAM) Workshop (14 PDUs)

You'll experience creating an earned value management baseline, determining earned value from project status,calculating earned value management indices, and estimating final cost and completion date. This workshop is perfect for team leads, control account managers, financial and schedule control staff,project and program managers, and chief project officers.

Excel EzEVM™Templates may be retained by attendees to implement earned value management in their organization.

I recently had a customer of our Study Guide call with a question about the on-line interactive version. After two calls the question was answered but it was revealed that their EVP exam was scheduled FOR THE NEXT DAY!

Folks, this is not the way it's supposed to work. The Study Guide's goal is to help you find your weaker areas so that you can focus your study time in these weaker areas. But you have to have study time remaining! By finding out the night before the exam that you don't know some exam topics as well as you thought just means you won't get a good night's sleep. You will just be dreaming of train wrecks. Your exam score will suffer.

EVM WORLD 2014 (Registration is open)

WHEN: May 21-23 2014

WHERE: San Antonio, TX

MORE INFO: http://evmworld.org/

AACE International Annual Meeting
WHEN: 15-18 June 2014

WHERE: New Orleans, LA, USA

MORE INFO: AACE

9th ICEC World Congress

WHEN: 20-22 October 2014

WHERE: Milano Italy

MORE INFO: TBD

PMI Global Congress 2014 - EMEA

WHEN: 5-7 May 2014

WHERE: Dubai, United Arab Emirates

WHEN: 26-28 October 2014

WHEN: 12-13 November 2014 (Yes 2014)

WHERE: Bangkok Thailand

WHEN:16-19 November 2014

WHERE: Miami, Florida, USA

MORE INFO:  TBD

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• More Control Accounts are better that fewer
• The lower the WBS the better
• Work Package actuals must be compared with Work Package budgets
• Early EVM data is useless

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