Page "Earned value management" Paragraph 30

Figure 5: A comparison of three EV curves without PV and AC.

In a lightweight implementation such as described here, the project manager has not accumulated cost nor defined a detailed project schedule network ( i. e., using a critical path or critical chain methodology ).

While such omissions are inappropriate for managing large projects, they are a common and reasonable occurrence in many very small or simple projects.

Any project can benefit from using EV alone as a real-time score of progress.

One useful result of this very simple approach ( without schedule models and actual cost accumulation ) is to compare EV curves of similar projects, as illustrated in Figure 5.

In this example, the progress of three residential construction projects are compared by aligning the starting dates.

If these three home construction projects were measured with the same PV valuations, the relative schedule performance of the projects can be easily compared.