Tracking and Reporting Progress
The role of development projects is to solve problems. We spend our lives dealing with unknowns and we frequently encounter unexpected problems and opportunities. Unfortunately, it seems to be a law of product development that every surprise involves more work. This means that our projects will always run late unless we recognize the problems in time to do something about them. For example, on a 26-week project, if you discover in week 5 that the work is taking longer than planned, you have time to replan the work, to get help, or to renegotiate the product's content. However, if you cannot precisely measure job status, you will not know that you are in trouble until it is too late to recover.
The TSP uses earned value (EV) to measure your status against the plan. With the help of this measure, you will always know job status to within a few hours. However, EV works only when the plan accurately represents what you are doing and when all team members regularly measure their work. Figure 14.1 shows an example of the status information that TSP teams get every week. This team had completed 7 weeks of a 17-week project and was falling behind. To understand the problem, the team planning manager made the following calculations: