Earned Value - Man Hours

About - If the Productivity was 1 = the Forecasted hours would be 50 Itself.  

• If planned and actual productivity whatever value it is are equal then the forecast would be as planned itself,  the rest to me is kind of convoluted for me.

Deliveries are always related to some quantity, either measured as time or as a volume of work or as a lump-sum the whole measured as either 1 LS or 100%.  

• I do not understand how can you talk about productivity when there is nothing against which to measure it. Duration is a quantity, volume of work is a quantity. 

• Source Data	Planned		Actual		% of planned amount
  man hours	50	mh	25	mh	50.00%
  quantity	5	ea	2	ea/mh	40.00%
  Productivity	0.1	ea/mh	0.08	ea/mh	80.00%

• % of planned amount is unitless but it is based on some reference amount/quantity.
• The usual practice to quantify deliverables when there is no simple measure is to use 1 LS as the quantity and unit, it is very simple.  The measure of productivity when using LS is relative to the specific deliverable and cannot be directly applied to other deliverables, it is better to use other physical measures when possible. You could say for certain Concrete Pouring activity we have Concrete = 1 LS or you might say we have Concrete = 80 CM, the latter is a better approach. 

If an activity can be done in 40 hours using 5 resources A and I assign a volume of work of 100 % then the productivity would be 100%/[40hoursx4resource] =  100/[40x4] %/resource-hr = .625 %/resource-hr

For the average resource I would assign a productivity of  .625 %/resource-h

For a lower production resource I would assign a productivity of .80x.625 = .500 %/resource-h, if a rookie then perhaps even a lower production rate shall be considered.

The following example can give you an idea of what I would do.

Of course this is a very simple scenario, more interesting is when you want some resources to produce a fixed amount of the volume of work, say in Activity 3 Resources A instead of 45.45 let it be 70.00 and Resources B the remaining 30.00. 

The calculations are easier and dynamic if integral within the CPM.  Also much needed transparency is provided in this way.  Insane doing this using manual methods if similar to the prior shifts example, but with thousands of activities shifting in time as soon as there is some progress. 

Whenever you want to change any parameter just change it and click the mouse, so easy.

Duration type activities do not have volume of work associated so % done is a % of elapsed time, an example of such activity in my industry is concrete curing.  

For activities where there is some work related to it but cannot be easily measured in pure deterministic way maybe there is no better option than to assign an arbitrary volume of 100 and make an educated guess of % done.  Even for these type of activities different resources have different production rates and somehow it shall be defined.  Perhaps most Engineering activities fall in this category.

In my case perhaps 98% of Construction activities have a clear volume of work associated, while a 1% are pure duration type and a 1% are very difficult to measure.  For such activities I use volume of work activity type, with an arbitrary value of 100 and volume of work unit %.  This allows me to define resource/team/shifts production rates for such activities.

I am aware of how difficult it can be to measure activity progress on some jobs, Engineering, IT and Development jobs in particular.  But still you have to deal with the issue on having different resources/teams/shifts with different productivity. 

For Productivity type activities we use Volumes of Work, their duration is calculated during scheduling. 

> Budgeted Cost of Work Performed (BCWP), or Earned Value is budgeted cost of actually performed activity works. BCWP is also the value of work performed expressed in terms of the approved budget assigned to that work for a schedule activity or work breakdown structure component.  EV = Budget x %work done.

> Productivity or Production Rate = [volume of work] / [effort hours]; productivity or production rate is a parameter that can change as things happen different to as planned, predicted production rate can be different to current at different periods, can be different for different shifts and different teams working on the same activity.  This can complicate the calculations for activity durations if your software does not relate production rate and volume of work to activity duration.

> For volume of work we use units everyone at the job-site understand and uses such as CM [cubic meters] of rock excavation, EA [each] bricks, SF [square foot] of tile installation. Earned Value is calclulated for similar units.

> Forecasted Man - hours = [actual man-hours] + [remaining volume of work] / [adjusted productivity];  in case of different shifts the calculations for activity duration can be very tricky.

I use Best of Breed approach, we collect data using our financial system, we use the CPM for forecasting purposes.

• http://www.aronsonllc.com/sites/default/files/2014%20S300CRE%20Variance…;

Hello Everyone Can Earned Value be calculated for Manhours.

• Yes.

and Then can we forecast the expected manhours to complete.

• Yes but you will need software capable of modeling resource production rate and its relation to activity duration and resource assignments in order to get a dynamic projection, otherwise much manual adjustments might be needed.
• Keep in mind EVM is an overly simplified model that might miss the impact of changes in resource production rates among different activities each having a different impact on critical path. 
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