How You Can Benefit from Deltek EVM Solutions

Product User CommunityProject Management

August 07, 2024

Mark Smith

What is Earned Value Management (EVM) and Why Is It Important?

Earned Value Management (EVM) serves as a comprehensive project management approach that integrates scope, schedule, and cost metrics to deliver a precise evaluation of project progress. It empowers project managers to generate dependable projections, facilitating a comparison between a project's actual progress and its initial plan.

Key indicators within EVM include Planned Value (PV), Earned Value (EV), and Actual Cost (AC). PV denotes the estimated cost for project tasks at a given juncture, EV indicates the real worth of work accomplished thus far, and AC reflects the true expenses incurred during project execution. Through the examination of these indicators, project participants gain a transparent view of the project's status in relation to its timeline and budget.

The primary advantage of applying EVM in forecasting is its ability to benchmark project performance against the established baseline, allowing for the identification of variances and the implementation of necessary adjustments. Moreover, EVM equips stakeholders with enhanced decision-making capabilities through trend analysis and sophisticated data analytics.

Another reason EVM is important is because of the contract compliance requirements of the US government. DOD, NASA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, and other agencies are required to use EVM on development, modernization, and enhancement contracts over a certain dollar size. The government wants to monitor project performance and variances to help ensure that projects are completed on schedule and on budget. Government contractors who have contracts with these requirements are subject to audit, fines, and loss of contract if found out of compliance. Also, if budget or scope changes are required, justifications are needed, and there are processes to follow.

Even though the benefits of EVM are desirable, it is a project management best practice that requires hard work, discipline, and constant reinforcement. Successful EVM needs to start with strong leadership and a Project Management Office to enable the appropriate people, processes, and tools.

Another challenge with EVM is integrating the data sources needed to have a single source of truth on project budget, cost, schedule, status, and risk. Few things undermine project management faster than a lack of confidence in the project data.

Why Deltek is the Most Qualified EVM Provider

Deltek has been a vendor of EVM solutions for over 25 years and has established itself as an industry leader. Our product, engineering, and consulting teams have a level of EVM subject matter expertise unequaled in the government contracting industry. We have worked closely with regulators as contract requirements have been developed and refined. We participate in relevant industry groups such as NDIA and have standing meetings with DOE and other agencies so that we always remain at the forefront of adapting our products to meet our customer's evolving needs.

Our products are integrated to provide the ultimate in earned value project management. Scheduling, cost management, resource management, status tracking, change management, workflows, risk management and analytics all need to work together to achieve project objectives. Built-in integrations reduce errors and improve efficiencies.

Our client list is a who's who of leading government contractors. This is because our products are robust and integrated, and they get the job done. Our solutions are tested and true and have been used by customers to achieve their EVMS certifications. We understand government compliance and have built-in functionality to support clients with system audits and compliance reviews.

Deltek is committed to innovation and continues to invest in maintaining its industry-leading PPM solutions. A good example of this was the introduction of generative AI into PM Compass with a feature called Narrative Score, designed to improve the explanation of variance report quality. Our customer retention rate and loyalty scores make our competitors envious.

Deltek Earned Value Management Solutions Overview

Deltek Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions empower you to make informed decisions through the delivery of real-time metrics, project performance analytics and risk reporting. Our solutions go beyond the project, helping you achieve improved levels of project success. They are built for the way customers deliver projects, helping to drive peak performance and profitability. Deltek PPM is an integrated suite that puts your projects and people at the center of your business. Deltek PPM solutions allow you to:

• Analyze project schedule and cost data to create the best schedules and most accurate cost estimates possible
• Gain unmatched insight into project performance and leverage data to improve customer communication and reporting
• Integrate information on a dashboard to plan, update, manage variances, and model changes across your projects
• Create, manage, validate, and maintain project plans and schedules. Capture progress and update forecasts
• Quickly identify data anomalies and issues, allowing users to drill down into problem areas to gain actionable insight

In today's complex business environment, the more aligned an organization's people, processes and tools, the better it becomes at executing projects and delivering exceptional results. The following figure is an overview of Deltek's PPM solution.

As depicted in the figure above, Deltek PPM solutions provide world-class performance management, workflow, scheduling and risk management solutions to help you consistently deliver successful projects. Cobra is the EVM hub, taking in cost data from the customer's ERP system and resource-loaded schedules from Open Plan, our scheduling solution. PM Compass provides visibility and tracks updates, Acumen supports schedule quality and risk management, and wInsight Analytics does reporting and trend analysis. Deltek has designed these products to work together to provide the ultimate EVM solution. The arrows indicate product integrations and additional details are provided in the product sections below.

Deltek Earned Value Management Solution Details

Deltek Cobra for Cost and Earned Value Management

Deltek Cobra is our cost management product, and it is used to manage costs, establish compliance controls, measure earned value, predict future performance and achieve project success. Top benefits include improved reliability of program status, better cost controls, and more robust EVM compliance. Key features include portfolio summaries, program controls, and project forecast comparisons.

Cobra's EVM capabilities include all of the required government reports, earned value calculations, and extensive forecasting capabilities. The solution produces all of the required IPMR reports and IPMDAR CPD export formats, supports complex burden structures, and supports 15 different techniques to calculate earned value. Using multiple forecasts, you can easily calculate the minimum, maximum, and most likely forecast as well as keep a Control Account Manager (CAM) forecast. You may also create additional calculated forecasts that can be used to objectively validate the CAM forecast. These features not only meet all of the exacting government requirements, but they also provide the flexibility to allow you to accurately predict the cost at completion.

Customers can enhance their Cobra solution by integrating cost data from their ERP systems, including a direct integration with Deltek Costpoint, our industry-specific solution for government contractors. Schedule data can be imported from Deltek Open Plan, Primavera P6, MS Project and Excel. Deltek's global consultants have extensive experience integrating the most popular industry tools and can help you design a streamlined best-practice solution to fulfill your unique needs.

Deltek Open Plan for Schedule and Resource Management

Deltek Open Plan is our scheduling product, and it is used for planning and scheduling with multi-project support, resource management, risk analysis and flexible reporting. Key benefits include building reliable schedules, improving schedule quality, and resource management. Key features include critical path analysis, real-time quality checking, and replanning.

Open Plan supports EVM capabilities by allowing you to add resource assignments by period, conduct robust baselining, trace the critical path, and produce DECM reports with an integration with Deltek Acumen. The solution provides real-time schedule quality checking features that allow you to see the same metrics used in the DCMA EVMS Compliance Metric (DECM) while you are editing your schedule. In addition, you can create your own schedule quality validations/rules and use colors or text to explain what rule is triggering from the most recent data change. The IPMDAR Schedule Export provides a number of options to make the IPMDAR SPD deliverables simple and seamless. Open Plan helps identify critical and driving paths based on logic or the DCMA Constraint Method and can find and fix redundant logic quickly to avoid corrective action requests.

Open Plan is deeply integrated with both Cobra and PM Compass and provides users with real-time project data, leading to informed decisions to help keep projects on track. Import and export schedules from Oracle Primavera P6, Microsoft Project and more. Export to IPMDAR SPD formats.

Deltek PM Compass for Project Visibility and Control

Deltek PM Compass uses workflows to drive project management, scheduling, cost management, change control, reporting and analysis. Top benefits include improved visibility and control, simplified project reporting, and significantly improved change management. Key features include customizable dashboards, automated change management, project update workflows, variance management, and real-time performance management.

PM Compass supports and enables EVM functionality across our PPM products. The integrated budget change request feature lets you model multiple changes at once without changing the live schedule (or making a copy). Once all approvals for the change are completed using the workflow, the change is automatically applied to both Open Plan and Cobra - without any data entry! PM Compass also uses the variance thresholds entered in Cobra to automatically create Explanation of Variance workflows containing the variances that exceeded the thresholds. The workflows are then used to gain approval for the explanations before they are posted back to Cobra. In addition, AI is used to score the narratives entered by assesses that content against a set of industry best-practice criteria, providing a score and tips to help the user quickly and effectively improve report quality.

Again, PM Compass, Cobra and Open Plan are deeply integrated together. In addition, PM Compass allows you to model multiple changes so you can see the effects of the changes before approving and applying them to the live project. You can even perform complex change requests that include features such as Cobra's Replan as part of the change request, directly from the PM Compass interface.

Deltek Acumen for Schedule Quality, Risk, and Modeling

Deltek Acumen is our schedule and risk management product, and it is used to analyze schedule and cost data, manage risk, accelerate schedules and improve confidence in successful project delivery. Top benefits include improving schedule quality, reducing project risk, and accelerating schedules. Key features include baseline comparisons, quality metrics, logic analysis, and a project maturity framework.

Acumen includes built-in analysis of DCMA, DOE, GAO, and NASA EVM compliance requirements and other industry standard metrics and benchmarks, including oversight reports. Acumen helps import and analyze data from multiple sources including Deltek Open Plan and Cobra, MS Project, Primavera and IPMDAR. Supports importing and exporting from one schedule format to another to meet compliance needs, including new IPMDAR SPD and CPD formats.

Integrations include importing schedule and cost data from Deltek Open Plan, Oracle Primavera P6, Microsoft Project, Excel, Deltek Cobra and more. Import and export to IPMDAR SPD and CPD formats. Create your own metrics in Acumen Fuse and leverage them in the Acumen Suite.

Deltek wInsight Analytics for Earned Value Analysis

Deltek wInsight Analytics is our EVM analysis product, and it is used to analyze earned value data, visualize trends, evaluate project performance and improve compliance reporting. Top benefits include improving performance analysis, finding emerging issues earlier, and improving compliance. Key features include portfolio views, analysis, and reporting.

wInsight Analytics includes powerful EVM analytics to evaluate performance, identify trends and validate the accuracy of forecasts. EVM variance reports can be used to help identify performance issues and prepare for customer discussions. Earned value metrics can be viewed in dynamic charts to easily see variances and trends and identify upcoming issues. Easily import standard format data from various sources (IPMR/XML, IPMDAR/JSON, MSP, Excel) for analysis.

Users can import schedule and cost data from Deltek Open Plan, Oracle Primavera P6, Microsoft Project & Excel, Deltek Cobra and more. wInsight Analytics can also be used to import and export to IPMDAR CPD format and IPMR XML Format.

Ready to Learn More?

It's easy to see why companies that want to practice earned value management turn to Deltek PPM. With decades of experience, industry-leading products, hundreds of systems in production, and a future full of innovation, there's no better choice.

• Cost Management
• Earned Value Management
• Project Portfolio Management
• Aerospace & Defense
• Construction
• Energy, Oil & Gas
• Government Contracting

Mark Smith