Earned Value: BCWP calculation

Marco

Dear all, please is there anybody who can explain (STEP-BY-STEP, please) to me how BCWP for:

resources assigned
tasks
Activities (grouping tasks)
the project itself

is calculated ?

I found this on Merlin Guide : "...BCWP indicates the original budget cost of work performed so far. Merlin uses the current completion value whereby it utilizes the planned values (gray bars) to calculate the costs as if the planned bars had already been completed..."

Please, what's the meaning of "uses the current completion value" and of "...whereby it utilizes the planned value... etc." ?

Thank you very much.

In the attached file, I found quite hard to apply that sentence to the values I reported. Regarding this example, please consider that the number of working days elapsed from project actual start is 21 (the "Time Now").

More exactly, I can easily apply the formula for BCWP calculation: (BAC / LRE) x Tn, whereas BAC is Planned Costs, LRE is the Expected Duration, and Tn is the number of working days elapsed from the Actual Start.

Now, this perfectly works for resource assigned, whilst it's not applicable for grouping tasks or project.

Please, is there anybody who could explain this to me ?

Thank you so much indeed for your kind attention and time dedicated.

Best regards,

Marco

Frank Blome

Hi Marco,

What you are asking for is deep in the source code of the Merlin project. We can have a look at it, and I'm even willing to publish it here, because it's not a big secret. But it takes time and effort ... 😉 .

You probably ask because you saw a difference between your calculation (according to the book) and the result in Merlin Project. This is mainly due to the difference in base numbers. As you may know, we don't store a baseline in Merlin Project. And the BCWP (some call it EV) requires planned values.

So what we do is take the planned values of tasks, resources and their assignments and model their values on the schedule and even the assignments & their attachments.

I can well imagine that if you export the schedule and create your EV in Excel (or Numbers), it may look different.