The concept of S-Curves is not new. S-Curves have been used as a charting or graphical tool for many decades for various purposes. They are also not new to Project Management having been used to plot project effort against time.

I believe however that they have been under-utilised as a project management reporting tool. They provide a very effective visual method for portraying the planned effort over the course of the project and for ongoing reporting of Actual against Plan against Baseline.

S-Curves provide a graphical medium for project reporting, by plotting cumulative effort against time. The resulting curve should resemble an S in shape (see Example S-Curve at the end of this document). 

The Project Baseline, the Current Plan and the Current Actual Progress To-date can all be plotted on the one chart. This will clearly highlight differences between the Baseline, the Current Plan, and Actual Progress to-date, 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 warning that you may be straying from the Baseline

See the Example S-Curve below which shows the Work or Effort on the Vertical Axis and the Date on the Horizontal Axis.

This example has been produced from software my colleague (Mike Turner) and I have developed to run off MS Project Server 2007.

We also have a stand-alone S-Curve reporting module we have developed to run off MS Project 2003 and 2007. If you are interested in the software, please contact me by clicking here.

Example S-Curve

Actual - Cumulative actual work completed based on the marked completed tasks on the schedule

Plan - Cumulative currently planned work over the course of the project based on tasks on the schedule

Baseline - Approved and saved baseline of work over the course of the project based on tasks on the schedule

Click to download the attached file(s):