Rating: 
Summary: A Simplistic Look at a Valuable Tool
Review: Joel Koppelman and Quentin Fleming have provided project managers with a practical and readable review of the history, purpose and use of an invaluable tool - earned value. There is nothing difficult about the concept. Its focus is the accurate measurement of physical performance against a detailed plan to accurately predict finished costs and schedule. It requires a project's scope be defined and integrated with all of the available resources. If used properly, the calculation provides an early indicator of project slippage or the scope of project cost overruns. The book would rate, in my mind, a five-star rating if the authors included practical examples or a few case studies.
Rating: 
Summary: Earned Value Mgmt is finally made available to the masses.
Review: Quentin and Joel have finally put this little known but historic managment tool in the hands of project managers everywhere.
The authors have taken the time to strip away the traditional
jargon associated with EVM (Earned Value Mgmt), and have put
it in a context immediately useful to a wide range of projects.
The techniques they have covered should help managers manage
more effectively by giving them the tools to know where the real project problems are, predict future performance, and make
hard decisions with factual data.
Ray Stratton,
President,
Management Technologies,
Brea, CA
Rating: 
Summary: Where is the rest?
Review: So far I have found two books dedicated to the topic of earned value: this book by Fleming and Koppelman and another book entitled `Using Earned Value' by Alan Webb. Note that I am not listing the earned value `Cliff notes' entitled `Project Management: The Commonsense Approach" by the Lamberts, which will not add to your understanding of earned value management or analysis, and serves, at best, as a memory jogger on the basic concepts.
"Earned Value Project Management, Second Edition" by Fleming and Koppelman provides a good treatment of the history of earned value and of the calculation methods of its core measurements. However the book falls short in terms of methods of analysis and interpretation of these measurements, which is really where project managers need guidance and expertise. Indeed calculations are automated by the scheduling packages (e.g. Microsoft Project, Primavera, etc.), in other words getting the numbers is never the problem (although some packages have had their share of problems doing this), or let's just say it's the easy part. Obviously one needs to understand how the numbers are calculated and what they mean but this part of earned value does not require a whole book about it. The true challenge in earned value management is the analysis part. Once you have the numbers, you need to understand what they mean to your project, how they trend, how they relate/influence one another and most importantly how you should use them in gauging the health of your project. This information then needs to be translated in either corrective actions (which are hopefully proportional to the problem at hand) or inaction (provided that you have made the conscious decision, based on the data, to keep things as they are). I believe that this is where this book falls short. It gives the reader an understanding of the concepts but lacks in the guidance that is required for a true, practical, and day-to-day application of earned value on projects. In another words, it's a good start but not quite enough.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books on Earned Value!
Review: The reader that is familiar with Project Management Institute books will find it extremely useful and connected to real life. Presents Earned Value definition and how is possible to organize your projects based on Earned Value principles. If you're interested to have results oriented projects, or if you're interested in project performance, or project monitoring, this book is really helpful. I highly reccomend you to read and use it. If you like "not so academic" books, you might find it a little bit too condensed, and probably you'll need to search for something else. Microsoft Projects offers very good definitions of Earned Value, Cost Performance Index and Schedule Performance Index that you might learn as first steps.
Rating:
Summary: Earned Value Concepts you can use
Review: This is one of the easiest to understand books on project management I have read! Quentin provides background and history for the Earned Value concepts and explains them in a simple and usable way. This book is a must read for project managers who need to really tell how their projects are doing! CSCS folks will learn how the system was supposed to work! Daniel Coza
Rating:
Summary: Unique book about a powerful project management tool
Review: This is the only book that I know of that is totally devoted to earned value project management. Before proceeding with a review I believe that a few facts about earned value project management are in order. First, earned value project management has graduated from a tool that was little known outside of the Department of Defense contracting community to a mainstream project control tool. This milestone occurred when it became a part of the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Second, "earned value" is a misunderstood term. I have had clients who thought it was a consultant's trick to raise prices or hide the true costs of projects in a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Just the opposite is true - earned value is a proven, powerful tool with which to control project costs and schedules. If you use it any poor estimating from the project planning phase will become quickly apparent, allowing you to recalibrate the project before it gets out of control and cannot be salvaged. As an aside, I use a heuristic that boils down to: if you are 15% off cost or schedule by the time you are 15% into a project you will not recover using your original baseline. Earned value project management techniques will give you ample warning before you drift into an unrecoverable situation like that. The authors have distilled thousands of pages of DoD instructions and guides and lessons learned from the inception of the Cost/Schedule Control Systems Criteria (C/SCSC)into a 141 page book that thoroughly covers the subject. The C/SCSC is where earned value was first defined in the late 1960s. I like the way the book is structured. It starts with a brief overview of earned value, from where it came and how it finally managed to escape from the bureaucratic world of DoD to become an integral part of the PMBOK. This overview segues into a chapter titled Earned Value Body of Knowledge, which is where the book gets interesting. This is followed by seven chapters that step you through how to correctly plan, schedule and control projects based on earned value. The key strength is the authors demonstrate how projects are traditionally planned and controlled, and the pitfalls of this approach. For example, using cost/funding where you get a budget, develop a spend plan and then attempt to determine a project's health by comparing the burn rate to the spending plan is like flying blind. Why? The cost components are not integrated with schedule components. This results in controls that will never reveal any relationship between budget and schedule, and is a big reason why projects too often have cost or schedule overruns. By demonstrating problems with traditional approaches to project management the authors lay the groundwork for how to employ earned value to avoid these problems. They start by systematically stepping through a project, starting with scoping, followed by planning and scheduling. This material is excellent and on the mark. It introduces you to work breakdown structures, organizational breakdown structures, and how the two intersect to form control accounts (the authors use the term "cost account", but my background has instilled "control account" into my vocabulary). Earned value really begins taking shape in chapter 7, Establish Project Baseline, where the book quickly picks up pace. While earned value is simple in concept, there are many subtle elements that usually become apparent only with experience. The authors highlight these subtle elements, such as examples of how to interpret interrelationships between planned vs. actuals of work, cost and schedule. They provide standard tools such as schedule and cost performance indices (SPI and CPI), and add new wrinkles, such as "to complete performance index" (TCPI), which is a powerful management tool that I only discovered a few years ago. The best reason for reading this book is it will give you the tools and techniques with which to properly plan projects and prevent cost and schedule overruns. If you are pursuing the Project Management Professional certification this book is the best single source of information that I know of on earned value. Everything you need to know about earned value is packed into 141 pages of a book written by two renowned experts on this subject.
Rating: 
Summary: OUT DATED
Review: Why would anyone buy this edition - it's outdated. There is a newer edition with a lot more current material and it has over 50 pages more text. See isbn 1880410273 for the second edition of this title. That newer edition deserves all the compliments mentioned above and below for this edition.
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