Offered By: Casinelli Associates
Professional Development Hours: 21
Course Number: AEP4003-PCCS-02
Duration of Course: 3 days
Primary languages: Italian and English

Learning objectives
The course provides advanced knowledge on the process of project planning, progress and performance measurement through Earned Value methodology. The course is designed to complete the basic course (PC-CS-01) and offer to project management professionals the opportunity to enhance their professional practice.

Marketing description of the course
The advantages of using earned value (EV) have been widely pointed out by thousand of papers and many books. Nevertheless, especially in Europe, the concept of EV is still widely unutilized and few companies have been established their own "best practices" of project control based on EV. The course is aimed to offer a complete scheme of approach to set and implement EV management systems.

Detailed course outline
The course provides advanced knowledge on project control: planning, project progress and performance measurement. The course is designed to complete education and training offered by the basic course on project planning and scheduling (PC-CS-01), but it offers to the project management professionals (planners, schedulers, estimators, project controller and project manager) an opportunity to refresh and enhance their professional background or to refine their professional practices.

Section 1: Project control process
This section defines the objectives of project control and the scheme of process. This section has the goal to present a structured approach to project planning. The types of "planning" are described with reference to project management processes and focus is given to the integration between cost and time.

Section 2: Measuring project progress by earned value (EV)
This section defines the "project progress" and presents the concept of earned value (EV), describing different ways of calculations (level of effort, units completed, incremental milestones etc).

Section 3: Measuring earned value (EV)
This section describes how to calculate EV in different typologies of activities and in both the situations of "fixed budget" and "variable budget".

Section 4: Setting the integrated time-cost control system
This section describes the model of integrated time-cost control system based on EVMS (earned Value Management System). The process starts from project planning through the development of WBS, OBS, Cost Account (Control Account) and Work Packages, and continues describing the Cost Breakdown Structure (CBS), the performance measurement baseline (PMB). Special focus is given to cost management, clarifying how handling direct and indirect costs, in order to identify management reserve and undistributed budget.

Section 5: Running the system and practical simulations
This section describes through a practical example, by using a specific EV software tool, how to set the system: from initial cost estimate and project budgeting, to the definition of "control account level", work packages and PMB (performance measurement baseline). The simulation continues showing how to analyze performance data and how to use project performance indexes for forecasting.

Program

1st day
Project control process

• Scheme of process
• Goals of project control
• The flow of operations
• The key parameters of control
• The mutual interrelationship between time and cost.

Measuring project progress and earned value (EV)

• How to measure progress
• The concept of earned value
• Calculations of earned value
• Earned value vs. productivity
• Historical review of Earned Value

2nd day
Measuring earned value (EV)

• Earned value for fixed budget
• Earned value for variable budget
• Measuring productivity
• Parameters for control: ACWP, BCWP, CV and SV
• Indexes for performance SPI and CPI, PI (productivity)
• Project management consideration

Setting the integrated time-cost control system

• Project planning process set up
• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and Organization Breakdown Structure (OBS)
• Cost breakdown structure (CBS)
• CBS vs. WBS
• Control account
• Work package
• Planning activities and Tasks
• CPM scheduling vs. work packages
• Project cost estimate and budget
• Time-phased budget
• Direct and indirect cost
• Management reserve and undistributed budget
• Performance measurement baseline

3rd day
Running the system

• Scheme of process
• Flow chart of operations
• Procedures for data collection
• Data analysis
• Performance measurement and forecasting
• Practical simulation trough a specific EV software tool
• Typical outputs
• Historical outline: C/SCSC (Cost/Schedule Control System Criteria).
• Current Standard: EVMS ANSI