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ANSI/EIA-748, guideline by guideline

The question a programme controls lead asks in the first ten minutes is whether the tool supports an EIA-748 compliant EVMS, and where it stops. This is the answer, in the standard's own order, with the stopping points named.

The standard is sold by SAE, so nothing here quotes it. Each row paraphrases what a guideline is for, in our words, and then says what the product does. If a paraphrase is wrong, that is our bug — tell us.

How to read the status

That last category is not evasion. An EVMS is validated as a contractor's management system — people, procedures and the books — and a tool is one component of it. A vendor claiming "EIA-748 certified software" is describing something that does not exist, and the reviewer sitting across from you knows it.

Organization

Guidelines 1 to 5.
#What it is forWhat the product doesStatus
1The work is broken down into a product-oriented structure.Control accounts carry a WBS element, and the element can point at the systems model, so the breakdown and the design are one tree rather than two that drift.met
2The organisation doing the work is identified.A control account carries an OBS reference and a named manager. One without a manager is refused at construction, not warned about.met
3Work, schedule, budget and cost are integrated.One record. A work package has a budget, dates and an earning rule; the schedule is the same programme the planner shows; cost is read from actuals. There is no second copy to reconcile.met
4Indirect costs are identified and managed.Rate schedules and multipliers by category, so a costed hour states which rate it was costed at. Pools, allocation bases and the rate agreement live in your accounting system.partly
5The breakdown and the organisation intersect at the control account.That intersection is the control account record: WBS, OBS, one manager, and the budget beneath it.met

Planning, scheduling and budgeting

Guidelines 6 to 15.
#What it is forWhat the product doesStatus
6Schedule the work with the sequence it actually has.A dependency network with a critical path, calendars and working time.met
7Measurable units of work, with objective indicators.Eight earning rules: 0/100, 50/50, 25/75, percent complete, weighted milestones, units complete, level of effort, apportioned effort. A planning package is refused an earning rule, because a package that measures nothing must not earn.met
8A time-phased budget baseline to measure against.A named, dated baseline with its unit stated, holding distributed budget, undistributed budget and management reserve separately. Planned value is time-phased across working days.met
9Budget by cost element where it is meaningful.Budgets are held per work package in one stated unit. Splitting a package by labour, material and subcontract is not there.partly
10Discrete work packages, with the rest in planning packages.Both exist as different kinds of record, and a planning package that reaches its start date is visible as one still needing conversion.met
11Work package budgets sum to the control account budget.Roll-up is computed from the packages rather than entered, so the two cannot disagree. A zero-budget package is refused at construction.met
12Level of effort is identified and kept to what is genuinely LOE.An earning rule marked non-discrete, so a screen can say how much of the baseline earns with the calendar rather than with the work.met
13Indirect budgets are established and controlled.Rates exist and are applied. Budgeting and control of indirect pools happens in your finance system.partly
14Management reserve and undistributed budget are identified and controlled.Both are fields on the baseline, held apart from distributed budget and shown as their own figures rather than folded into a total.met
15The baseline reconciles to the contract target cost.The structure to hold it exists. Reconciliation against a contract value, and the contract record itself, do not.partly

Accounting considerations

Guidelines 16 to 21.
#What it is forWhat the product doesStatus
16Record direct costs from the books.Actuals are records read in, not invented. The product deliberately does not compute cost: a tool that manufactured actuals would be worse than one with none.met
17Summarise direct costs into the WBS without pro-ration.Costs roll up through the same package-to-account structure the budgets use.met
18Summarise direct costs into the organisation without pro-ration.The same roll-up, through the OBS reference on the account.met
19Record indirect costs.Applied through the rate scheme. Recording the actual indirect expense belongs to the accounting system.partly
20Identify unit, equivalent unit or lot costs.Units-complete earning exists. Unit-cost reporting as such is not built.not yet
21Track material cost and quantity as it is used.Not built. Material accounting, including commitment against receipt against consumption, is a real body of work and is not pretended at.not yet

Analysis and management reports

Guidelines 22 to 27.
#What it is forWhat the product doesStatus
22Monthly, compute schedule and cost variance at the control account.Planned value, earned value, actual cost, schedule variance, cost variance, SPI and CPI, per package and rolled up. On demand rather than monthly, which is a superset.met
23Explain significant variances.The figures are produced and shown. A narrative variance report, with thresholds deciding what counts as significant, is not built.not yet
24Identify and explain indirect cost variances.Rate variance is expressible, because a costed hour carries the rate it was costed at. There is no indirect variance report.partly
25Summarise through the WBS and the OBS for management.Roll-up runs through both.met
26Act on the problems the data shows.The programme office's job. What the product contributes: a variance is attached to the work package and the element it belongs to, and treatment lives as tasks and risks on the same record rather than in a separate action log.yours
27Revise the estimate at completion from performance to date.Estimate at completion three ways, with what each assumes, because a single figure hides the assumption that produced it. Estimate to complete and variance at completion come with it, reported the way IPMDAR reports them.met

Revisions and data maintenance

Guidelines 28 to 32.
#What it is forWhat the product doesStatus
28Incorporate authorised changes in a timely way.Baseline changes go through a recorded action rather than an edit, and a rebaseline refuses to proceed without a stated reason and an authorising name.met
29Reconcile current budgets to prior budgets.A rebaseline keeps the prior baseline rather than replacing it, so before and after both exist.met
30Control retroactive changes.Refused in code rather than discouraged in a procedure: the budget of a completed package cannot change, and neither can one that started before the baseline's freeze date. A retroactive adjustment rewrites a variance instead of explaining it.met
31Prevent unauthorised revisions to the budget.Baseline actions are named and refused if unknown, and the store is append-only and content-addressed, so a change is a trail rather than an overwrite. Who may authorise one is your policy.met
32Document changes to the performance measurement baseline.The reason and the authoriser are required fields of the rebaseline record, and the record is kept.met

What is missing, in one place

So that nobody has to assemble it from the tables.

Checking this against your own EVMS procedure?

Send it over. We would rather find the row that is wrong than have you find it during a surveillance review.