Earned Value Reporting – To Complete Schedule Performance Index

In this article on Earned Value Reporting we’ll look at something similar to the To Complete Cost Performance Index – the To Complete Schedule Performance Index, or TCSPI. The To Complete Schedule Performance Index tells us the required schedule performance index that will be needed to meet the schedule.

The book “The Project Management Question and Answer Book” by Michael Newell and Marina Grashina is the source for much of this overview.

What is the to complete schedule performance index?

The to complete schedule performance index, or TCSPI, is similar to the TCCPI except that it calculates a required schedule performance index that will be necessary to meet the project schedule. This measure is rarely used. It is included here for completeness. It has the same problems as the TCCPI and is even more abstract and difficult for people to understand.

The calculation for the TCSPI is done by dividing the work remaining by the remaining schedule.

TCSPI = (BAC – BCWP) / (BAC – BCWS)

It can be seen that as a project’s schedule performance index moves below one, the TCSPI will increase and become greater than one. Although called an “index”, this is not really accurate since all indexes indicate something bad when they fall below one and this index indicates something bad when it is greater than one.

There is a mathematical difficulty with this term as well. If a project is over budget toward the end, it is possible for the BAC and the BCWS to be equal. This produces a division by zero and a point of discontinuity.

Under normal conditions it results in a value that indicates the required performance that the project must have from now until the end of the project.

Example:

Suppose a project is somewhere near 50 percent complete:

BCWS = $100,000

BCWP = $95,000

ACWP = $97,000

BAC = $200,000

SV = BCWP – BCWS

SV = -$5,000

What is the TCSPI?

TCSPI = (BAC – BCWP) / (BAC – BCWS)

TCSPI = (200,000 – 95,000) / (200,000 – 100,000)

TCSPI = 1.05

Notice that if the schedule variance remains the same as the end of the project approaches, the TCSPI increases rapidly. Suppose we have the following when the project is approximately 95 percent complete:

BCWS = $195,000

BCWP = $190,000

ACWP = $192,000

BAC = $200,000

SV = BCWP – BCWS

SV = -$5,000

What is the TCSPI?

TCSPI = (BAC – BCWP) / (BAC – BCWS)

TCSPI = (200,000 – 190,000) / (200,000 – 195,000)

TCSPI = 2.00

As we approach the end of the project, the schedule variance has not changed, but the TCSPI has changed from 1.05 to 2.00. This means that the work that must be accomplished from now to the end of the project must take place at a rate that is twice as fast as was originally planned.

IT Leaders Struggle with Bringing Social Networking into Formalized PM Processes

The July 20, 2009 issue of InformationWeek brings us an article by John Soat on how IT leaders are wrestling to bring informal collaboration into rigorous processes such as global project management and product development. I’ve included a portion of that article – including a discussion on how one company is using IWMS vendor Skire’s Unifier product to managing their project, collaboration and communication needs.

I’ve personally worked with several people at Skire during an evaluation of their product and found this article very interesting. Please read on….

The Right Place for Social Networking?

Nevsun Resources is a mining company with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, and its biggest project is developing mines in Eritrea, a small country on the east coast of Africa. Using a browser-based, software-as-a-service project management tool, logistics clerks, engineers, and project managers are sharing documents, cost outlines, and project schedules across continents, giving CFO Peter Hardie in North America what he calls a “real-time review” of the project in a fairly remote area of Africa. “The spectrum of people using it is broad, and that’s what we were hoping we would get out of the system,” Hardie says.

The system – called Unifier, from the vendor Skire – lets Hardie “bridge the time and distance gaps that exist between the project principals in Vancouver, Eritrea, and South Africa,” he says. It helps Nevsun control costs and track expenditures down to the invoice level.

Social networking norms increasingly are creeping into formal project planning and product development tools and processes. And at many companies, the rules both formal and informal for how to use those social computing tools often aren’t written down. Nevsun’s system let’s people comment and ask questions about a record or specific aspect of the project. But there’s always a way to opt out of the collaboration flow. Asked if he uses the ad hoc communication capability in the Unifier system, Hardie says: “Me, personally? No.” Instead, if he’s reviewing specific costs and has a question, he’ll simply pick up the phone and call somebody.

As almost all business becomes global in nature and business processes increasingly are managed online, companies continue to push the limits of technology created to manage projects and teams across time zones and geographies. The goal is to communicate more effectively, work more closely with partners, leverage ephemeral information sources, and ultimately get as close as possible to the feel of what’s really going on.

Nevsun’s experience with Skire is just one cross-continent example. In product development, vendors such as Dassault Systemes, Siemens, and others are plowing Web 2.0 capabilities into their product life-cycle management platforms, adding collaboration and complexity.

Running alongside these formal platforms is the aggressive use of Internet-centric social networking platforms and tools – wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence awareness, peer reviews, search – to foster internal teamwork and tap into wider communities of knowledge. Yet IT teams are wrestling with how these tools function in concert with collaboration technology, such as document management, project management, and product development systems. Are they adjuncts, integral parts, or even replacements for tried-and-true software?

Plenty of CIOs also are wary of the data integration, security, and productivity issues raised by the introduction of social networking technology in the enterprise, especially when tied to a process as critical as developing a new product or completing a project. Yet some of embraced the dynamic nature of social computing and turned it to their advantage.

Four Challenges to Ad Hoc Collaboration

Creating Norms. When you have a wiki and formal project or product development software, what conversations happen where? One idea: If it’s tied to a process step, keep it in the formal tool. If it’s about improving that process, go to the wiki.

Breaking Convention. Product development is a high-stakes process. Injecting social networking conventions adds risks. Yet it could be vital to global teams that innovate ideas as well as execute.

Finding Insights. Done wrong, wikis can create islands of insights that the right people will never find.

Conquering Fear. Subject experts might be wary of sharing hard-earned insights, since they see that as their value.

What is Web 2.0?

We’ve all heard of the term Web 2.0, but what exactly is it? and how do benefit from its use?

According to Wikipedia

“The termWeb 2.0 describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. “

Listed below are some of the components that make up Web 2.0.

Read more »