Sim4Projects™ Earned Value Exercise

In this exercise, you will analyze actual cost, baseline cost and variance at completion for your Sim4Projects™ results.

This is an opportunity for each student to further explore the Microsoft Project reports from Sim4Projects™.  Submit a short paper, and the MS Project file, with the following information included. 

1. Bring up the MS Project file associated with your team’s Sim4Projects™ results.
2. Insert the following additional columns in MS Project.
   1.  Actual Cost
   1.  Baseline Cost
   1.  VAC (Variance at Completion)
   1.  Project Summary – To see your overall project totals, insert a new task as row 1. Then highlight rows 2 through the last task and click the green right arrow in the tool bar to indent these rows. You will see summary totals appear in row 1. Just retitle the task name.
   1.  Variances – To better explain variances, add 2 additional columns: “Baseline Work” and “Actual Work”, which enable you to see if hours worked were a factor in the overrun.
3.  Through period 5 or 6 (your choice), identify the top 5 activities that resulted in the highest overrun. Do not identify summary lines, only actual activities. You can identify these 5 activities by highlighting the line or identify the line numbers in the Word document.
4.  Create a Word document in APA format, including a cover sheet with your name. Explain in one or two sentences why each of these activities were overrun. That means one or two sentences per activity.
5.  Lessons Learned – with this EV knowledge, what would you recommend be done differently?