This page provides shortcuts to my Earned Value article in the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering.

• Link to online copy. As of 27 June 2011, you can purchase just the EV article (without having to buy the whole encyclopedia.) [Update, March 2013: the publishers seem to have reverted to selling it only as part of the larger work.  I’m corresponding with them to find out what happened to the single article purchase option]
• Hard copy of the whole encyclopedia (about 120 articles on other topics, in addition to my one on Earned Value.  Each article is about 30 pages and all are peer reviewed by experts in the relevant field.)

I’m sorry but I cannot provide copies of the article here, since the copyright is held by the publisher.  By the way, I make no money from the sale of the article, so I hope you’ll consider me reasonably unbiased when I say that it’s well worth reading.  (Well, OK, about as unbiased as an author can be about his own work!).

To those who’ve seen my Earned Value talk with the animated interactive charts, this article does include some important details which I could not fit into the talk – in particular how to obtain objective “progress” numbers, and a discussion of how Earned Value relates to the critical path on software projects.

The article also forms a “bridge” between the purely graphical approach, which I use throughout my talk, and the numerical/mathematical approach which is the norm in the EV community.  As such, I believe it is one of the few pieces of writing on Earned Value which brings together all four of the following viewpoints:

• Agile project management
• “Traditional” (non-agile) project management
• An intuitive graphical “feel” for the subject
• The standard mathematical formulae of Earned value

I hope you find it to be balanced, reasonably comprehensive and, most  importantly of all, useful.