Welcome back. In this lesson, we discuss how to set up the resource and planning curves you'll need to monitor your project. This is the first step in assessing earned value on a project, and in determining the project status. So where do we stand at this point? We have a project that has been authorized, we've developed this project scope statement, and the work breakdown structure. We have developed our resource loaded project schedule, and we have a cost baseline. A cost estimate which has been time sequenced in accordance with the schedule. The next step is to take these planning documents and put them into a format that can be used to monitor and control our project. Developing Resource Loading Curves is a good first step in preparing our control plan. For most projects, there are two options for the Resource Loading Curves. The first option is, the Cost Resource Curves. This is prepared using a cost estimate and is a plot of planned cost expenditures over time, basically the cost baseline in the curve format. Project managers who are responsible for the total cost of the project typically use this curve. A second option is to prepare a Man-hour Resource Curve. This is a plot of planned man-hours to be expended by the direct staff on the project over time. Typically it's taken from the resource loaded schedule, assuming one of the resources you have included is the manpower needs. Most projects with a significant expenditure of man-hours will prepare this curve, and track it to make sure they have sufficient resources for the project. If you are a project manager who does not have full cost responsibility, then the Man-hour Resource Curve is a good tool to estimate your progress and status. Typically you'd been taking responsibility to make sure resources are effectively used on a project, and this curve will help you with that task. For simple projects, these curves could be done in Excel or a similar spreadsheet. The system does not have to be complicated to provide good feedback. This is what a typical resource curve might look like. The orange bars indicate the incremental expenditures for each time period. The blue curve indicates the cumulative expenditures over time. It is essentially a summation of the orange bars up to any point in time. When you prepared your cost baseline, you probably prepared this curve, this is its source. If you're using a man-hour resource curve, it will look very similar. The main difference is that it displays planned, incremental, and cumulative man-hours to be spent by the staff. In this case, you'll get the data from the resource loaded schedule you prepared earlier. Here, we see Plan vs Actual Curve for the project. In each time period, we add the actual incremental costs expended, seen here as the blue bars, next to the planned incremental cost, the orange bars. And then sum up the actual cumulative costs, and plot this curve in parallel to our cumulative planned value curve. On the example curve, we can see how this might look for a hypothetical project. For this project, as we compare the actuals to our plan, the project status looks good, we're under-running our budget. Things are going great, or are they? How do we know if we're under-running because we're doing better than planned or because we haven't done enough work? How do we know where we are going to finish in terms of both schedule and budget? The answer to this, is Earned Value Management, or EVM. Earned value management is an approach that combines the scope, schedule, and cost baseline, into a project performance and progress measurement tool. The key element of EVM is an agreed method to measure the physical progress of each WBS work package. By measuring the physical progress in an orderly fashion that matches the way we estimate the project. We can get an objective sense of whether we are in fact, following the project plan, exceeding it, or hopefully beating it. In this lesson, we learned how to set up our resource loading curves based on our cost baseline and our schedule baseline. We discussed putting the actual status on them. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to set up an Earned Value Management system, and calculate earned value. We will add our results to these curves, to give us a good picture of how we are actually performing on our project.