The EVM Hoax: A Program Leaders Bedtime Story
Abstract
About 20 years ago, a story surfaced about a substance called di-hydrogen monoxide. This compound was a major component of acid rain, deadly if inhaled, and often found in industrial solvents and nuclear power plants. Yet di-hydrogen monoxide was also an excellent fire retardant and often found use as an additive to many food products in the supermarket! This story was a simple hoax that occasionally reappears on the web. For anyone with a basic chemistry background, di-hydrogen monoxide is quickly recognized as H2O. We call it water. When it comes to how we teach and train in the federal acquisition environment, the story of Earned Value Management (EVM) is not altogether different from the saga of di-hydrogen monoxide. EVM is not a hoax, of course, but it often suffers unnecessarily, at one extreme, from the dismissive detractor who wishes to ignore its benefits and, at the other extreme, from those taken in by the tales of danger that EVM costs too much or is way too complex. One might wonder if those at the extremes of EVM are the same ones who did not do so well in high school chemistry! In the minds of many federal acquisition professionals, EVM suffers from the unfortunate reputation as a system that requires excessive number-crunching and produces esoteric results that sometimes seem irrelevant to managing a program. Gold-card carrying EVM practitioners are often relegated to isolated corners of financial management shops where they can recite obscure passages from ANSI/EIA-748B while entering data into large, complex spreadsheets. Here, it is little wonder that EVM is far removed from the program managers decision-making inner circle. Even EVM training seems to reinforce the image that EVM is the territory of green-eye-shade accountants and Ouija-board mathematicians. Its little wonder that ordinary acquisition professionals approach EVM with pitchforks and torches.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- AD1015764
Entities
People
- Pat Barker
- Roy Wood
Organizations
- Defense Systems Management College