Value Earned Tracking is a superior method of tracking projects, and has been used on many mission critical projects. It tracks the scheduled hours and expected achievements within those hours, against the actual hours, and actual achievements. Harvested correctly, this information will provide any manager with precise status of the project to date, thus enabling him/her to execute a successful project.

Compublue has developed a plug-in for MS Project, which extract the information required for Value Earned Tracking, automatically launches MS Excel, and uses Excel’s capabilities to plot the precise status of the project. A manager, in a matter of few seconds can get an exact read on project progress. Here is an example of what such a graph looks like. The graph, connecting Diamonds (dark blue), depicts the schedule. The graph, connecting squares (pink), shows the actual hours, spent by the team members, on achieving their goals. The graph, connecting triangles (yellow), depicts the actual work being completed. In general, we can see that more hours are being spent, but fewer results are being achieved. As you can see, it takes about 5 seconds, to see how we are doing. But how should one track a project, that would bring about such data for viewing. That is one of the Project Management competencies, offered by Compublue.