1. Do earned value metrics provide a comprehensive look at project performance? Could a project that fails to meet its business objectives finish with positive earned value metrics? If so how? What other measurements or metrics could be considered in addition to earned value metrics?

2. Your project team has completed 120 hours of work for the delivery of a software module. The cost of these 120 hours of work was $95,000. The actual work packages completed during these 120 hours, however, was calculated as $65,000 based on the original budget. At the start of the project you had estimated that at this point in the project you would have received 150 hours of work packages at a cost $50,000.

a. What is the planned value, earned value, and actual cost (in dollars) in this example?

b. What is the Schedule Variance (using dollars)? What does this mean?

c. What is the Cost Variance (using dollars)? What does his mean?

3. You will be reporting out project performance to your executive team later this week. You have calculated the EV to be $1,200,000, AC to be $1,600,000, PV to be $800,000, and the BAC is $3,500,000. Since the beginning of the project, the state of the business has changed and budgets are being cut across the entire organization. Based on this information, the executive team wants to understand the possible final cost of the project if the team gets back on track to the original schedule and if it continues on at the current rate. How much additional funding will be required in each case?

4. You have inherited a project with the following parameters:

SPI of 1.033 (103.3%), CPI of .72 (72%), PV of $870,000 and SV of $30,000.

Unfortunately, you do not have the cost variance for the project. Using the parameters above, calculate the cost variance for this project. Before you begin, consider whether CV should be negative or positive.

5. You have taken over a project for a colleague that has gone on medical leave. Before your colleague left, he provided you with the chart below (see Figure 1 on p. 2) to be used for EVM. Based on this chart, and assuming that the project reverts back to the original planned performance, what is the SPI, CPI, EAC, and ETC? How would you describe the current state of the project?

(Consider $210,000 as the BAC)

Figure 1. Earned Value vs Actual Cost vs Planned Value for Problem 5.

Figure 1. Earned Value vs Actual Cost vs Planned Value for Problem 5