Achievements

1. GOA Project

1 Million Euro awarded for a 6 year European EVM/project controls research project

The PMI EVM CoP has been advised that the European EVM researchers based at Ghent University, Belgium headed by Prof. Dr. Mario Vanhoucke have been awarded a €1 million Euro (around $1.36 million US dollars) for a 6 year EVM/project controls research project:

Searching for static and dynamic project drivers to predict and control the impact of management and contingency reserve on a project's success

The 6 year research project will run from 2012 to 2018 and will involve 6 full time doctoral (PhD) students based at Ghent University with additional academic reviewers of the research results plus additional part time participation. It is a collaborative effort currently involving:

  • George Washington University (USA)
  • University College London (UK)
  • CERN (Switzerland)

The project will be lead by Prof. Dr. Vanhoucke and his team at Ghent University in conjunction with representatives from each of the collaborating universities. The project aims to progressively publish the research findings in the leading international project management academic journals.

Please click on the following link to download the research project flyer which provides additional information:

Discussions are also underway aimed at forming a groundbreaking "Practitioner Review Committee" (PRC) which is expected to be a committee of the EVM Europe Association. The charter of the PRC will likely include:

  • Providing input into new research ideas.
  • Regularly receiving updates about the research results obtained from the academic research in order to translate relevant findings into practical application and transitioning these into practice.
  • Recommending relevant research results to be included in the ProTrack software tool.
  • Publishing the practitioner based findings in the relevant project management professional journals.
  • Providing regular presentations on progress and topics of interest to the EVM Europe conferences and at other events of interested organisations.

Prof. Dr. Vanhoucke will be presenting on the Research project including the aims and objectives and immediate way forward at the EVM Europe 2011 Conference held in Valencia, Spain on 23rd and 24th November 2011.

2. EVM Conference

Controlling projects using Earned Value Management has become a standard in managing and measuring the performance of project portfolios. It has been used for both large and small projects in various sectors, and has been subject to a lot of research. However, despite its widespread use, there are still major opportunities to further enhance the knowledge of this project management control system.

The EVM Europe 2011 conference will showcase Earned Value Management best practices and novel research activities to Europe. It aims at bringing practitioners as well as researchers together to share their knowledge and exploit opportunities. The global aim of EVM Europe is to increase the use of EVM and to stimulate and challenge both project managers and researchers to go in discussion, aiming at bringing the current state-of-the-art knowledge to a higher level.

3. ProTrack

ProTrack (acronym for Project Tracking) is a project scheduling and tracking software tool developed by OR-AS to offer a straightforward yet effective alternative to the numerous project scheduling and tracking software tools. The software has been built based on the results of various award winning research studies and many discussions with practitioners using earned value management. The scheduling and tracking approach is based on the current best practices of earned value management and novel concepts.

ProTrack includes many dynamic features and integrates project scheduling (the project baseline) and risk management (schedule risk analysis) with project tracking and monitoring. For more information, please visit www.protrack.be.

4. OR-AS

OR-AS develops Applications and Solutions in the domain of Operations Research, helping their clients in the optimisation of complex business processes through their expertise in quantitative data analysis, optimisation and simulation. For more information, please visit www.or-as.be.

5. PMKC

PM Knowledge Center (PMKC) is an online learning tool on Project Management and Dynamic Scheduling and includes technical articles on "project baseline scheduling", "schedule risk management" and "project control" as well as quizzes to test your knowledge on these topics. Since PMKC is fully integrated in ProTrack 3.0, you can automatically find all updates there, or you can browse all free content or use the search engine on www.pmknowledgecenter.com.