When we talk to many organisations about how they manage projects, the software products that spring to mind range from individual and low-end team tools such as Microsoft's Project through to high end project portfolio management solutions such as Primavera and Artemis. However, it also leads to comments inferring that project management is all about Gantt charts and critical paths, with distributed task management to users letting them know what they are meant to be doing and how far along they are meant to be in the fulfilment of various aspects of the work involved with the project. Note the "meant to be" in both parts here: that the majority of projects are not where they are "meant to be" seems to be an accepted issue and few seem to have an approach to ensuring that the project is actually at the same point.

Many project managers seem to be happy with solutions that provide them with nothing more than a snapshot in time, giving them a picture of where they are in relation to the original plan, without any contextual view of what this means to the overall viability of the project itself. These tools breed a knee-jerk project planning approach—a report is run, things are seen to be wrong, the next set of tasks on the critical path are looked at and squeezed as hard as possible. The project leaders agree to the changes (what else can they do?), the tasks either take as long as originally planned or fail completely, and the project becomes more unravelled as the original deadline looms.

Within the world of verticals such as construction and heavy manufacturing, however, there is a strong understanding that project management has to be far more inclusive and contextually relevant. Although critical paths and task management are very important parts for ensuring that a project should complete on time, they do not in themselves help in ensuring that a project is completed to budget, nor do they really help in providing the information that is needed to make that most horrible of all project decisions—when to kill a non-performing project.

Here we see the nub of many project problems. Various research shows that between 50% and 80% of all projects fail to provide against the promised functional deliverables, time and/or cost. The main problems in running projects seem to be:

• the overall visibility of risks
• a lack of understanding of the interdependencies of the various financial aspects of a dynamic project and the end cost
• end to end management of not just tasks, but of internal and external resources and the links and interdependencies between these

One area where a firm hand can be kept on whether a project is still viable or not is through the use of a methodology termed Earned Value Management (EVM). EVM is big in the US; indeed, federal projects generally have to have an element of EVM capability built in by the contractor to ensure that their bid stands a chance of getting through the early stages of review.

In essence, EVM takes a snapshot view of where a project is against where it was planned to be, but at a far more complex level than standard time-based project tools. Whereas many systems tend to just look at how well task fulfilment is going against plan, EVM looks at more variables, including actual time and budget spent to a specific point of the project and actual future resource availability against the planned values.

The planned values provide a Performance Management Baseline (PMB). When plotting the planned values of time and cost against actual values, 2 gaps can then be identified—the variance between planned and actual cost, and the variance between planned and actual time. With access to the correct tools, these gaps can then be trended. The outcome can then not only help identify at an early stage any issues and allow small changes to be made so that a project can be brought rapidly back on track, but will also give the capability to play the "what ifs" that are necessary to make the decision as to whether a project should be stopped—is it really possible to throw an amount of resource and money at a project to really meet requirements, whether these be based on cost, time or functionality?

For organisations that are consistently run on a project basis, such as professional services, civil engineering, construction and so on, whether projects are successful or not defines the overall success of the company. These types of organisation need solid foundations to plan, track and manage projects.

One vendor that provides a set of systems for providing such a service is Deltek. Its enterprise management software portfolio includes various EVM tools aimed at ensuring that project managers can keep full control of projects to a highly granular level, along with solutions that extend up and down the value chain to suppliers and customers to ensure full resource management.

Other vendors, such as Primavera and Artemis, also provide EVM solutions to be used within their project management portfolios, but we often see co-opetition within the market, with Primevara or Artemis being utilised as the underlying project management system, but with Deltek providing other specialised areas such as EVM.

For those who are project managers, the use of EVM can be a critical indicator towards the success or failure of the project. With basic approaches running such high risks of highly expensive and visible project failure, EVM-based project management can provide the granularity for project managers to make the small alterations to direction that can keep a project on track, rather than the knee jerk reactions that can completely unsettle a project.