Applying Earned Value Managementin Service Projects : A Case Study at Saab Surveillance

Abstract: For organisations to stay competitive, continuous improvements and development are needed.Organisations handling complex services, structured in projects, find difficulties in understanding the project performance. Understanding the project performance is important in order to achieve the ability to implement improvements and development activities in projects. Furthermore, project performance needs to be understandable for the whole organisation in order to be able to prioritize. There are several applicable methods available for handling the evaluation of performance. One method is Earned Value Management, EVM, which incorporates project scope, schedule and cost parameters in order to create project control.The purpose of this study is to investigate how EVM could be implemented for evaluating performance in projects handling repair and maintenance based on the EVM standard ANSI/EIA-748. The purpose is also to identify needed adaptations in the projects to make it possible to implement EVM. The EVM standard contains important steps and activities needed in order to be able to aggregate values and evaluate performance.The result of this study presents adaptations needed for EVM implementation based on the EVM standard ANSI/EIA-748. The study concludes that some structural and managerial changes need to be done before EVM can be implemented. The organisation needs to formulate common guidelines for structuring work and organisations, as well as formulate and define common reporting structures for documentation and reporting. In addition, the way of handling planning, and budgeting need to be reviewed and customised. The organisation also needs to continuously work with the knowledge and understanding about the importance of the business and the evaluation, to create a successful EVM implementation and a sustainable business.