Calculate Progress
Calculate progress is a mean of calculating monetary value based on the progress entered so you can measure the project's health.
Earned value is calculated at the work package level in Cobra, and applied to all resource assignments in the work package.
Earned value for completed work packages is equal to the total budget for those work packages. For activities not yet started, the earned value is zero.
For work packages in progress, there are a number of progress techniques used to objectively measure earned value. The basic theory behind these progress techniques is to multiply the budget by a percentage complete to calculate the earned value. Earned value never exceeds the work package budget.
Similar to how Cobra supports multiple budgets, it can also support multiple earned value classes. This is useful, for example, when you are tracking professional services. For example, assume the following:
- You have budget using the billing rate and would like to use earned value to determine progress payments.
- You have budget using internal rates and would like to see the earned value based on the internal rates.
In this example, you would need two earned value classes to accurately represent the earned value for both budgets.
Use the Calculate Progress Wizard to calculate the earned value for a project or group of projects.
You can also run the Calculate Progress process through the API and the Cobra Web Service.
Related Topics:
Guidelines for Accurate Earned Value Management
To ensure that management decisions are based on accurate information, it is important that there is a sound representation of the value of the work earned. It is also important to reduce the subjective nature of statusing long work packages.
The progress technique selected for a work package determines how earned value is calculated. Earned value is used to measure the work package's performance.
Cobra provides a project option that lets you choose to calculate earned value by budget, by dollars, by time, or by hours SPI.
How Cobra Calculates Progress to Determine Earned Value
Cobra calculates earned value on each work package according to different principles.
Sample Earned Value Calculation
See this example of how Cobra ensures that earned value never exceeds the work package budget.
Because of the possibility that schedule status information has been entered directly into detail files without having undergone a validation process, errors can occur during earned value calculation.
Concurrent Progress Calculations
Cobra leverages the PM Compass Process Server to support concurrency in running progress calculations on batches of control accounts.
To calculate the earned/earned value of a project's in-progress work packages, you must complete the information required on each page of the Calculate Progress Wizard.
Follow the procedures in this section to utilize the Calculate Progress process.
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Supported Processes, Operations, and Data