Page "Earned value management" Paragraph 27

The second step is to assign a value, called planned value ( PV ), to each activity.

For large projects, PV is almost always an allocation of the total project budget, and may be in units of currency ( e. g., dollars or euros ) or in labor hours, or both.

However, in very simple projects, each activity may be assigned a weighted “ point value " which might not be a budget number.

Assigning weighted values and achieving consensus on all PV quantities yields an important benefit of EVM, because it exposes misunderstandings and miscommunications about the scope of the project, and resolving these differences should always occur as early as possible.

Some terminal elements can not be known ( planned ) in great detail in advance, and that is expected, because they can be further refined at a later time.