As some of you may have already seen in a recent blog post by the Director of the DAU Acquisition & Program Management Center entitled “Earned Value Management Training Change at DAU,” the importance of Earned Value Management (EVM) as a critical acquisition management tool is being reemphasized, reiterated, and reinforced as part of a range of initiatives to reinforce the competencies, skills, and expertise of the defense acquisition workforce. The new designations and updates to these learning assets outlined below are integral parts of that initiative.

In his blog post, he advised the program management community that “recently, Defense Acquisition University transferred curriculum management of the Earned Value Management (EVM) courses from the Business center to the Acquisition center.  This move recognizes the importance of EVM as a critical, multi-disciplinary tool for efficiently executing programs.  The change supports facilitating EVM training across the entire university curricula.  While EVM training will expand in other career fields, the EVM courses will remain core training for the financial management and cost estimating career fields.”

He went on to say that “historically, earned value analysts assigned to the business career fields have been the primary practitioners of EVM in program offices.  The effective use of EVM requires the involvement of the entire program office team.  The (primary) DAU EVM courses are:

·         BCF 102, Fundamentals of Earned Value Management;

·         BCF 203, Intermediate Earned Value Management;

·         BCF 262, EVMS Validation and Surveillance; and

·         BCF 263, Principles of Schedule Management.

Beginning in the DAU 2013 course catalog, the short title of these courses will change as follows:

·         BCF 102 to EVM 101,

·         BCF 203 to EVM 201,

·         BCF 262 to EVM 262, and

·         BCF 263 to EVM 263.”

He concluded by saying, “this change coincides with a significant update to course content in EVM 101 and EVM 201. The upgrade of the online EVM 101 content is ongoing, and the EVM 201 content update is in the early planning phase.  DAWIA career field core training requirements will remain unchanged – those career fields that currently require core EVM BCF courses will require the renamed EVM course. “

For life cycle logisticians and product support managers (PSM), at the present time, there is not currently a requirement that mandates members of our workforce take one of these soon-to-be redesigned EVM courses for life cycle logistics certification, but EVM training is still highly encouraged, particularly for those who are currently in or seek to be in senior acquisition program leadership and managerial positions in the future.