Is the overrun general or is it one bad line?
Nine workstreams, ahead of schedule and over budget at the same time. The roll-up says the build is four percent over, and one line on its own is worse than the total, which is the difference between a cost problem and a supplier problem.
Words on this sheet
- Venue: The place an event is held. A venue line is what hiring it costs, usually a fixed amount whatever the turnout.
Operations Intermediate Project Health Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
Is the Event Build On Track?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Cost performance
- 0.957 every dollar spent has bought 96 cents of work
- Schedule performance
- 1.05 5% more work done than the plan called for
- Forecast at completion
- $1,086,239 against the $1,040,000 budget
- The line that drives it
- CPI 0.79 stage, set and rigging: $238,000 spent, $189,000 earned
Nine workstreams of a conference build at the six-week mark. Each line carries what it was budgeted, how far along the plan said it would be by now, how far along it actually is, and what has been spent. Percentages are decimals, so 0.9 means 90%. Click Run and the tool rolls the lines up: budget at completion $1,040,000, planned value $674,500, earned value $708,500, actual cost $740,000.
The verdict is ahead of schedule and over budget. SPI is 1.05, so 5% more work is done than the plan called for. CPI is 0.957, so every dollar spent has bought about 96 cents of work. The forecast at completion is $1,086,239 against the $1,040,000 budget, roughly $46,000 over, and the to-complete performance index of 1.105 says the rest of the build would have to run about 15% more efficiently than everything so far just to land on budget.
Four percent over on a conference is the kind of number that gets waved through, and that is the trap this template is built around. Read the Task Roll-up table underneath and work the cost variance out line by line, which is planned cost times actual percent, less actual cost. Seven of the nine lines are on or ahead of plan on cost. The stage, set and rigging line is $49,000 adverse on its own.
The whole event is $31,500 adverse. The single bad line is worse than the total, and six healthy lines are quietly subsidising it into looking like a mild general overrun. That is what a roll-up does: it is an average, and an average is the wrong instrument for finding the one thing that is wrong. The action that follows is completely different in the two readings.
If the event is 4% over you tighten everything, annoy every supplier and save very little. If one supplier is 26% over on a line that is 90% complete, you have one conversation this week and the forecast moves back inside the budget. The percent-complete column tells you that conversation is urgent rather than academic: at 90% done there is very little work left for the remaining budget to be spread across, so this overrun is almost entirely realised rather than forecast.
Second run: change the rigging actual cost from $238,000 to $200,000, which is what settling the variations at the quoted rate would look like, and rerun. CPI comes back above 1, the forecast drops below the budget and the verdict flips to under budget. One line. What earned value cannot tell you is whether the percent-complete figures are honest, and on an event build where half the value is a supplier assertion the number to challenge is that column rather than the invoice.
To adapt it, replace the rows with your own workstreams, update the two percentage columns and the actual cost every week, and rerun.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Event Build, carrying these columns:
- Task
- Planned Cost
- Planned %
- Actual %
- Actual Cost
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Is the rollout slowing, or does it just feel slow?Is the Rollout Where It Should Be by Now?
- Will your shrink budget survive one bad incident?What Is Shrinkage Really Costing?
- How often does this store miss its number?Will This Store Make Its Year?
- Did the change work, or do your lines just differ?Did the New Process Actually Help?
- How many tickets before the event breaks even?Will the Event Make Money?
- What on-time rate can you actually promise?Will We Hit the Delivery Promise?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Schedule risk analysis.