Earned Value Method - Reporting Format

Earned Value Method - Reporting Format
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Many project management businesses have, of late, adopted earned value reporting as a standard management practice. So, here’s an article that explains the reporting format of earned value method. There is also an earned value management spreadsheet which can be downloaded from here.

What is the Earned Value Method of Reporting?

The growing preference for earned value method is probably because of its biggest advantage that it presents all the important performance criteria on a single sheet. This single sheet format contains information on the scope, schedule, as well as the cost of the project. In addition it also provides information about schedule and cost variances as seen during project execution. All this just

emphasizes how easy project tracking becomes with this single integrated project reporting technique.

The next section details out the information that goes into the reporting format of earned value method of reporting.

Project Reporting with Earned Value Method

If you’ve downloaded the reporting format from the above mentioned link to Bright Hub’s media gallery, a quick glance would be enough to understand that this earned value management spreadsheet requires four types of data. What follows is a detailed description of the information to be filled into the fields provided in the format.

Base Data

  1. Pre-established Budget at Completion (BAC): This is the total amount of budget allocated for the completion of the project.
  2. Budgeted Cost of Work Performed (BCWP): The total amount of cost estimates which have been approved for work performed within a given period. These cost estimates may be approved for particular activities or at the end of a project phase.
  3. Actual Cost of Work Performed (ACWP): The total amount from the budget that has already been spent on the actual work performed, within the specified period of time.
  4. Budgeted Cost of Work Schedule (BCWS): It can also be understood as project-to-date budget for the project. In other words it is the approved amount of budget for the work to be performed within the given time period.

<strong>Variances</strong>

  1. Cost Variance (CV): This is the differential amount between the actual cost of work performed and the budgeted amount.
  2. Scheduled Variance (SV): The difference between the budgeted cost of actual work performed and the budgeted cost of work schedule.

Indices (CPI and SPI)

  1. Cost Performance Index (CPI): this index can be arrived at by dividing the budgeted cost of work performed by the actual cost of the work performed. This index is indicative of the extent to which the costs can overrun by the time of project completion.
  2. Scheduled Performance Index (SPI): This index is the ratio of the budgeted cost of work performed to the budgeted cost of work scheduled, and is an indication of how well the project is moving as per the pre-established schedule.

<strong>Forecasts</strong>

  1. Estimate at Completion (EAC): The total of all the expected costs at the time of completion of the project. This can be calculated as the sum of ETC and the actual costs till date.
  2. Estimate to Complete (ETC): The amount by which the expected costs may increase at the time of completion of the project. This figure can be arrived at by making adjustments to the original cost estimates in-sync with how the project has performed till date in terms of costs.

This reporting format of earned value method isn’t very tough to use and even though it may seem too simple it does a great job for reporting the progress of a project. It just provides the pertinent information, cutting out all the noise.

Screenshot Taken by: Sidharth Thakur