Earned Value Management in the Cloud

Mark Tillema is President of Integrated Management Concepts, Inc. (www.intgconcepts.com). IMC is a recognized leader in implementing earned value management for organizations around the world and is the developer of DecisionEdge WebEVM.

Over the last few years contractors are seeing the requirement to have an ANSI-748 compliant earned value system as part of the procurement process. Up until now companies that have contracts/projects that don't meet the need to be certified but still have a self-certified earned value requirement are stuck with expensive "traditional" solutions with "traditional" high costs. Otherwise they end up trying to do it in Excel which means the project manager will spend many nights and weekends making sure the numbers reconcile. I can tell you from experience that both methods are painful and offer considerable risk to the monthly Cost Performance Report (CPR) submittal process.

Thanks to advancements in technology and cloud computing, state of the art ANSI-748 Earned Value software is now available to all contractors with a minimal cost to implement. The cloud reduces the costs that have been traditionally associated with ANSI-748 Earned Value software packages by eliminating both the high cost of acquiring software and the high cost of maintaining the hardware/software infrastructure. Software upgrades are done automatically on the cloud and, best of all, the cloud scales to match your organization's needs. The advancements in web technology also offer a much easier to use web interface. This ease of use coupled with cloud technology transform the experience for the user, avoiding the high cost of both acquisition and training.

Integrated Management Concepts developed one of the first Windows based ANSI-748 Earned Value management systems and has seen tremendous changes in the technology as our software has grown from the single desktop system to client/server solutions, web-enabled solutions and now Cloud-based solutions. Over the past 15 years, we have worked with small, medium, and large contractors and have found that implementation, training and maintenance of software/hardware systems are very costly and time consuming, especially for small to medium size government contractors. I believe the EVM in the Cloud can take that pain away and provide a successful path forward for small and medium government contractors wanting to bid in the federal space.