QSO 420 Milestone Two Guidelines and Rubric

Introduction

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a project management tool that is utilised to measure the performance of a project through a combination of scope, schedule, and cost. EVM would play an important role in the Clothes R Us point of sale (POS) project to track the progress and detect delays caused by issues such as GUI approval delay and resignation of product managers. The paper sets the valuable parameters of EVM, evaluates the project documentation, the process of calculating the earned value, and the optimal parameter that can be utilised to determine the earned value in the project.

Earned Value Parameters

EVM consists of four major elements of Earned Value (EV), Planned Value (PV), Actual Cost (AC), as well as the Budget at Completion (BAC). The value of work that is done is contained in EV. PV- It is the planned cost of work that was to be done within a particular time (Dissanayake et al., 2025). AC represents the real amount of the work already done, and BAC represents the amount of the entire work that is supposed to be spent.

These items in the case can be located in the project documents, such as the spreadsheet of the planning basis (Exhibit 6A) that shows the staffing costs, schedule, and total budgets. The PMO reports also provide data on the constant project performance. Cost variance and schedule variance are the EVM measures that can be computed using these records.

Analysis of the Project Documentation.

The documentation of the project may be of help in some calculations of the EVM parameters. The monthly and cumulative costs have also been included as an example of the plan that can be applied in calculating PV and BAC within a monthly and cumulative cost basis. The PMO reports track the progress and costs that can help in computing AC and estimating EV.

However, some of the missing information is lacking. According to Geegan et al. (2025), the share of work performed on each task is not stated explicitly, and, therefore, it is difficult to calculate EV. The project managers can manage this through progress reports, completion of milestones, or through personal observation of the tasks. The stages, like design or testing, can be addressed as an example in order to have an estimate of the amount of work accomplished. Consequently, the documentation is comprehensive, though it needs additional data to be collected.

Methods of Determination of Earned Value.

Earned value is calculated in several different ways. The 0/100 policy is only applicable in those scenarios when a job is done fully and is, hence, not very elastic. According to Dissanayake et al. (2025), the half-line rule equally shares half of the value in inception and the other half in completion, thus it is used in short tasks. The values of the per cent-complete technique are approximated by the amount of work performed and are more precise but demand that the data be trustworthy. The milestone approach attaches importance to the completion of some milestones of the project.

Each of the two approaches has its advantages and disadvantages. Simple approaches are easy to implement but may not reflect actual progress, yet more elaborate approaches are more accurate but would require close monitoring.

Choice of the Best Method.

The milestone method is the most suitable approach that would be used in the Clothes R Us project. There are also specific steps involved in this project; they are planning, requirements, design, coding, testing, and deployment. The phases include deliverables and the points of review; thus, they are better placed in the milestones evaluation.

This is rather sufficient for the nature of the project and ensures that when there is considerable progress, it is the value that is allocated. It is also not as subjective as the per cent-complete method, which highly depends on estimations. Such big IT projects like this one would be mostly appropriate using the milestone method, which is a fine approach to performance measurement, as it is both understandable and dependable.

Conclusion

To sum up, EVM can be successfully used in the evaluation of the Clothes 'R' Us POS initiative performance. Though the documentation available has a good base, further development of the progress data is required to make the calculations. The most suitable method among the various is the milestone method because of the phases and deliverables of the project that are structured. The effective use of EVM will contribute to enhanced project control and decision-making.

References

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Dissanayake, K., Pal, R., Johansson, E., & Persson, E. (2026). Enabling re-commerce business models in secondhand fashion retail: logistics challenges and resource demands. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, 1-22.

Geegan, S. A., Guo, S., Bingham, C., Jaffe, D., & Callahan, L. (2025). Meaningful Change from Spare Change: A Multi-Stakeholder Relationship Management Analysis of McDonald’s Round-Up Campaign. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 1-20.

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Venkataraman, R. R., & Pinto, J. K. (2023). Cost and value management in projects. John Wiley & Sons.