Nuggets of Wisdom from the Creator of Earned Schedule, Walter Lipke

Walter Lipke is the creator of the Earned Schedule technique and the author of the Earned Schedule book. 

What is the Earned Schedule?

Earned Schedule is a significant enhancement to Earned Value Management (EVM), extending its cost-based features to the management and control of schedule performance.

To learn more about Earned Schedule and how it helps the schedule performance evaluation and prediction, watch this video tutorial.  

We had the honor to interview Walter Lipke. Watch our interview with Walter for some nuggets of wisdom that can benefit you. We enjoyed this conversation and learned a lot.

During this great interview, Walter talks about EVM, how Earned Schedule was born, why and how he wrote the Earned Schedule book, and how you can ultimately succeed in your field and be highly recognized for your contributions inside and outside your organization.

Summary of Walter Lipke’s Nuggets of Wisdom

Here is a summary of the nuggets of wisdom that Walter shared during the interview:

1. Get The Management And Team Buy-In

Most of the time the project managers that apply EVM consider it to be a burden. What I find distressing is that many project managers just dismiss performance measures. They rely solely on their experience and intuition even if they have EVM there providing them information. They don’t look at it. They cast it off to financial managers. The project manager may get a report, but he doesn’t necessarily even look at it. Most of the time these managers are in crisis mode and so is everyone else including suppliers, employees, and the customer.

EVM will be successful when there is complete buy-in from top to bottom in the organization. To be useful, everybody has to believe that it’s providing something good. It’s going to provide you something that’s very useful.

2. Don’t Minimize What You Know

Many times, people minimize what they know and what innovations they have created in their own workplace.

I really had no idea that the Earned Schedule would have the impact it has today. I mean it’s been phenomenal to me. All I knew at the time when it was created was that it resolved the EVM scheduling indicators failure problem and it worked for our projects well. We prototyped it on about 50 to 60 projects and ran those prototypes about nine months. We got really good information out of the application of Earned Schedule. That made me come to the realization that this was something that other EVM practitioners should know about. That’s why I wrote some articles and they resulted in the Earned Schedule book.

So here is my advice: Don’t sell yourself short if you’ve created a useful novel process or tool. Let people know about it. On the other hand, if you’ve tried someone else’s recently published article about a new process or a new tool, report how it performed and publish a paper or present at a conference.

People are looking for new ideas. People want to know about new tools. So even if it’s only beginning with your local PMI chapter, start there.

3. Don’t Underestimate The Impact of Your Work

The success of the Earned Schedule has been very much a fortunate accident. It could have just as easily been overlooked or ignored. It could have been lost in the shuffle.

You never know when you write an article or make a presentation if it’s going to resonate. You don’t know if people will read the article. You don’t know if they’re going to try out any new ideas. You just never know.

But luckily for earned schedule people did pick it up. It wasn’t just one person. Practitioners picked it up. Researchers picked it up. I hit the jackpot! I mean it got into textbooks quickly. It was amazing to me. A lot of people got graduate degrees from it by doing research in it. People heard about it in a couple of conferences and then we got invited to others. We got invited internationally to London, Sydney, Brussels, etc. We made these presentations and that helped propagate earned schedule as well and all of it caused earned schedule to become recognized.

The propagation of the Earned Schedule and its institutionalization as a global standard is something amazing to me. I didn’t push it. I had very little input. Other people thought it was worthy. It is heartwarming to me that other people consider it to be significant enough to include it in national and international standards.

4. Don’t Get Rebuffed By Naysayers

Good ideas need lots of help. There will be naysayers. Earned Schedule has naysayers. So, don’t get rebuffed by naysayers. There will be if it’s a good idea. If it has good merit it will eventually be accepted into common practice. So, hold on to it.

Sometimes timing is everything. About a year after I created Earned Schedule, I realized it had an attribute that was almost hidden. You could address how well you were adhering to your schedule, how well you were executing your schedule, and you could analyze it using earned schedule methods. When I first published it, people weren’t ready to hear it. The Earned schedule was too new. I realized that in about two or three years later. I republished the article and it really got picked up. So timing is everything.

If you’ve been rebuffed once and your idea is good, try it again. Put it out there a second time or maybe even a third time. 

5. Plan Well

We had a major project. I kept asking the manager under me if he had the plan and he kept telling me, “No, we’re still planning.” It took him a year but what happened was that the plan was so well done that it minimized all kinds of problems and because of the success that they had, there were other contractors that were involved in doing the same things we were. We shined, they did not. In fact, the military manager stopped their project and their contract. We ended up getting their work because we were successful.

A great plan minimizes all kinds of negatives in the execution of projects. You don’t end up with omitting risk and having them come upon you and damage your project. You don’t have bosses and customer confrontations. You don’t have lots of contract changes or negative negotiations or even employee anxiety.

So, pay lots of attention to planning well. Do your estimations. Do lots of work on the estimations and have that all feed into your plan.

6. Select Your Leaders Carefully

Leaders will make all the difference. Have implicit trust in those folks and they, in turn, will do the right thing and they will carry your project through rough moments.

7. Be Honest, Curious, And Kind If You Want To Advance In Your Career

Be honest to yourself, your employees, your bosses, and your customer. When you have honesty and when everybody understands that everybody’s speaking what they know exactly as they know it, everyone pulls together as a team. You all become a team.

Be curious and have an interest in understanding. It leads to happiness and satisfaction in your work.

Be kind to others. Be a friend. Help your workmates. If you do, when you need help or aid they’ll be there for you as well.

8. For Success, Be Adventurous

Don’t be reckless. Evolve! Learn from mistakes. Always be willing to learn.

Those who are truly outstanding are going to shine. They’re going to be recognized. They’re going to advance due to their successes. Try your best and be as good employee as you can.

9. Avoid Behaviors That Limit Your Progress

There are behaviors that absolutely limit your potential and you should avoid them: procrastination, lying, negativity, tardiness, poor communication skills, excessive social interaction, bad temper, body language habits like rolling your eyes in front of your boss or waving your head around looking all over the place, lone wolf attitude, speaking out without thought, lack of courtesy, lack of manners, and lack of consideration of others. If you limit such things, you’ve got a good chance to advance your career as long as you put forth a good effort.

Resources

• The Audio version of the interview with Walter Lipke on Project Controls Mastery Podcast
• Earned Schedule Book by Walter Lipke
• Earned Schedule website
• Project Controls Training Programs
• Project Controls Video Tutorials