Managing Projects as Investments : Earned Value to Business Value

Due to a lack of appreciation of the true economic identity of projects, techniques and metrics that could hugely improve project selection and performance are not being used. This book provides insights and innovative techniques drawn from more than a quarter century of experience. These techniques have the potential to transform program and project management from the current haphazard application of various techniques and metrics to an incisive and integrated approach where programs and projects are managed for the crucial economic and financial implications that are at the essence of every project investment.

Every project is an investment; however, traditional project management methodologies do not support assessment of the business value that enables senior management to maximize decision making. The next evolution in project management, therefore, will be to manage projects as investments. Managing Projects as Investments: Earned Value to Business Value provides tools and metrics to enable planning, measuring, evaluating, and optimizing projects.

This book shifts the paradigm. It builds on traditional scope-cost-schedule tools, adding a critical new focus on the expected value of projects and programs. The enhancements in processes and metrics allow senior management and PMOs to guide the entire organization on the basis of business benefits, and to ensure that decisions ranging from project selection to resource assignment facilitate those goals. The author shows how framing projects as investments enables significant improvement in project performance. He provides metrics that allow you and your team to track and maximize performance based on ROI.

Demonstrating the importance of recognizing an enabler project in a program, and why its value and cost of time are so great, the book provides the tools to determine right-sized staffing levels for project-driven organizations. It includes a comprehensive but easy-to-understand explanation of both basic and advanced earned value metrics, their shortcomings, and how they can be improved and shows you how to optimize contract terms on projects in a way that can avoid misaligned customer/contractor goals.