Thank you for the question.
The earned value management technique has been around for years and years. The first requirement is that you need to have a good plan. Based on that plan, you load up with your resources that you need to deliver on that plan. Then the tracking becomes the planned value. As you go through six months of activities, you should be 50% done on a 12-month project. If your actuals, your financials, are over that or below that, it creates a variance that you track. That's the essence of earned value. It does that for scheduling variance. It does that for cost variance.
Now in our dashboard to Treasury Board, the colour for cost and schedule is no longer subjective. It is based on a percentage of variance on cost or scheduled variance.
We removed a lot of subjectivity from the process using earned value analysis. At the risk of repeating myself, the key element is to produce a quality plan up front. People in a hurry will often produce subpar plans if they feel they can get away with it later.
Earned value catches bad plans early in the process.