The EVM Europe 2012 conference will showcase integrated project control best practices and novel research activities to Europe. It aims at bringing practitioners as well as researchers together to share their knowledge and exploit opportunities. The global aim of EVM Europe is to increase the use of EVM and to stimulate and challenge both project managers and researchers to go in discussion, aiming at bringing the current state-of-the-art knowledge to a higher level.

The mission statement of EVM Europe is "Research meets Practice". The mission becomes very transparent at each conference thanks to a dual presentation track: one track focuses mainly on practitioners and another one is specially made for academics. At our previous conferences, we saw that the academics visit the practitioner track and the practitioners visit the academic track. And that is exactly our mission: we aim at bringing practice closer to research and research closer to practice.

 

So, we are not just an organization to bring practitioners together to tell what they did, what went wrong and what was so wonderful about the management of their project. We believe that conferences with case studies and best practices can be found all over the world. Instead, we aim at bringing practitioners together with a critical and open mindset, experienced project managers who dare to criticize their own approach and want to share their ideas with other professionals and academics. We aim at sharing knowledge, even if it comes from failures or less successful projects, learning from each other, criticizing each other and helping each other to do better, with only one goal in mind… bringing Project Management at a higher level, bit by bit, year by year. 

 

That is why we believe that the academics can play an important role in this mission. They inspire practice, and - at the same time -  are inspired by practice. Research at EVM Europe is not done in an isolated world but is based on experience from the professionals and needs from the real world. Therefore, EVM Europe's academic track is not a theoretical track. It is a critical view to the outside world and it is open to everyone, academics as well as practitioners.

 

Controlling projects using Earned Value Management has become a standard in managing and measuring the performance of project portfolios. It has been used for both large and small projects in various sectors, and has been subject to a lot of research. However, despite its widespread use, there are still major opportunities to further enhance the knowledge of this project management control system.

 

Although the abbreviation "EVM" in "EVM Europe" is used to refer to Earned Value Management, it does not mean that we only include presentations about Earned Value Management. On the contrary, EVM Europe's conference is not solely an EVM conference, but rather a conference focusing on "integrated project control". This includes but is not limited to EVM topics. Instead, the main focus lies on an integrated project life cycle approach and includes themes such as project design, baseline scheduling, risk management, project control, performance measurement, project maturity models and much more.