Earned Capabilities Management: A New Approach to Agile Governance, Building on EVM Best Practices
Abstract:
This presentation and paper focuses on the Program Executive/Sponsor stakeholder perspective. It brings together Agile concepts, EVM/project controls, and Capabilities-Based Planning to address the ultimate goals of the project….delivering value to the organization.
Currently, no popular methods exist to effectively track projects in terms of the return on investment (ROI) in dollars earned per dollar spent for projects with high levels of scope uncertainty. Traditional project management estimates project efficiency with EVM based on estimated effort to complete tasks within a defined scope. Agile management focuses on meeting the “definition of done” for evolving business requirements given time and cost constraints, but does not allow for a meaningful way to track efficiency or effectiveness.
Earned Capabilities Management (ECM):
• Focuses leadership’s attention on changes in a project’s timely delivery of capabilities with positive ROI, independent of a project’s original scope,
• Enables leadership to validate and verify Capability ROI during execution and aids in the decision-making process of determining when an Agile project is “done enough.”
• Emphasizes fast delivery of capabilities while they are still useful to the enterprise to ensure positive Capability ROI.
• Encourages rethinking the original scope to deliver cheaper alternatives, adjust for competing objectives, and discover novel solutions.
• Defends and maximizes the return on organization budgets, by always tying the capability lifecycle back to achieving the mission and vision.
The presentation will focus on core concepts, as well as project definition, control, and scaling for integrated project management using Capability ROI as the principle project performance metric.
