I have a thing about S-Curves and find them a valuable tool for project planning and project progress reporting. In fact I incorporate them in the reporting packages I develop for Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server, but come on, where do I get off; the notion of S-Curves is not new! I didn't invent them, so I better settle down and give you the facts.
S-Curves have been around and used as a charting and graphical tool for many decades in many industries for various purposes if you don’t believe this just type in s-curves to goggle and see what happens.
They are not new to Project Management either and have been used to plot project effort against time and budget against actual cost. But here comes the fascinating bit for me - I believe that they have been under-utilised as a project management reporting tool. They provide a very successful visual method for presentation the planned effort over the course of the project and for ongoing reporting of actual against plan and of course against baseline (original and current). S-Curves provide a graphical means for project reporting, for example by plotting cumulative effort against time, the resulting curve should resemble an S in shape, hence the name.
Right then, how can they be used for project management?
The Project Baseline, the current plan and the current actual progress to-date can all be plotted and all on the one chart. This will without a doubt highlight differences between the baseline, the current plan, and actual progress to-date, giving project stakeholders visual oversight, giving that warm fuzzy feeling or enabling corrective or remediation action to be taken early.
Correctly constructing and analysing an S-Curve representing your project schedule can tell you a lot about how your project deliverables and resource assignments have been scheduled. In particular the shape of the curve can provide visual feed-back on your project planning by highlighting potential problems with your planning.
S-Curves are a very useful tool for initial planning of your project and also for reporting progress against the plan or baseline. Analysis of "Actual Progress To-date Curve" tracking against "Baseline Curve" facilitates the achievement of your project goals by providing early forewarning that you may be straying from the baseline
