I came across a great article in PM Network this month that you should check out: EVM – Still Proving Its Value. As always, there are relevant tips and tricks that will help you in your career. First, EVM translates well across industries. Everyone speaks the language of money. When schedule and progress are expressed in monetary terms, everyone can understand that. I will add that this takes some education on the part of the Project Manager. It really is your job to promote and sell the concept to your business leadership.
Fortunately, there are two excellent vignettes on how to achieve buy in from the team and the executive suite for implementing EVM.
How is that applied in small IT environments? Well, it’s tricky, especially if you are working on contract for the company. Take just a portion of the project and apply EVM to it. Perhaps you can use EVM for just one feature or phase of the project. This is a scalable tool.
One more great tip from the article about integrating with Agile: Don’t be afraid of the multiple baselines and changes. Roll with those changes and show how EVM helps keep things on track.