Question 7 5 Marks Will Fence is a large timber and Christmas tree farmer who is attending a project management class. When the class topic came to earned value he was perplexed. He was unclear about whether or not what he does in practice is earned value. This is what Will does: Each summer, Will hires a crew of workers to shear fields of Christmas trees for the coming holiday season. Shearing entails having a worker use a large machete to shear the branches of the tree into a nice, cone-shaped tree. His approach is as follows: Step 1: He counts the number of Douglas Fir Christmas trees in the field (i.e. 24,000). Step 2: He agrees on a contract lump sum to pay for shearing for the whole field of trees (the contract is $30,000). Step 3: When a request for partial payment for the work completed so far arrives (after 5 days work), Will counts the number of trees actually sheared (i.e. 6,000 trees). He then works out the percentage of trees actually sheared and multiplies the percentage completed by the total contract amount to calculate the partial payment to be made at that time. (For the data so far, this would be 6,000 trees out of 24000 trees which means 25% of the trees have been sheared. 25% of the total contract is 25% of 30000, so the partial payment will be $7,500) a) Is Will over, on, or below cost and is Will using earned value? Explain. (3 marks) b) How can Will set up a schedule variance?