When we look at most projects,
they typically have one of these sideways S-curves.
We first start off in the project, not doing so many tasks all at the same time.
And so not so much work is happening and we're not spending so much money.
In the middle of the project, a whole lot of things are going on at the same time.
We're spending money like crazy.
And then near the end of the project, it sort of tapers off now.
We're at the last two tasks are being done.
We're not doing quite as much work, we're not spending quite as much money.
So typically, projects will have a curve that looks like this.
And this is called our plan.
This is our planned value curve.
And it's the baseline for our project.
There are two other curves on here that we're going to look at.
One of them is the project for the project.
And that's, that pink line on there.
So this one says, you know what, we're ahead of schedule on this.
We're moving faster than we thought.
And in fact, as soon as we get that total amount of work done, the project is done.
So this project is finished, and
it's also over budget, because we dumped in some extra overtime or
something to spend some more money to get the thing done faster.
It might have been some requirement that happened out there.
Maybe we had a customer or a, you know, competitor that was getting to
the marketplace sooner than us, that we realized oh, we gotta catch up.
So we'll put some overtime in here.
A little bit more money.
More people on this, so we get things done faster.
This one is ahead of schedule but also a little bit over budget.
This is what we're looking at.
We want one that's exactly on track, beginning to end of the project.
This means that our estimates were perfect.
We put all the right people on all the right tasks.
Everybody is working at a self-actualization level.
And no risks hit the project.
Everything went perfect.
You're a great project manager.
Everything's perfect from beginning to end.