Microsoft Project Earned Value Addin for EVM Lite

As many of you know Microsoft Project’s inherent Earned Value capabilities are limited.

Typically organizations doing Federal work that have to comply with the ANSI 748 guidelines purchase a separate package like Deltek Cobra or Deltek MPM that integrates with Microsoft Project and adds the needed earned value capabilities. These are excellent tools but there are definitely organizational costs involved in learning a separate product, maintaining it over time and dealing with the types of integration issues you get each cycle when passing data between separate products.

We recently worked with a commercial organization that wanted to improve their project/program management practices by using earned value techniques but didn’t need to comply with the 748 guidelines. For this effort we used an addin to Microsoft Project from a company called forProject. This tool is called forProject Reporter and adds earned value capabilities directly into Microsoft Project. This is a much simpler process for producing the earned value metrics and reporting. The tighter integration into the Microsoft Project data structure will result in lower costs to run the system.

Full disclosure : forProject Inc. has some of the same ownership as Pinnacle.