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Rolling Wave Process or Weekly Earned Value

Projects with high risk and require greater analysis can take advantage of weekly earned value without overburdening the system using a process called rolling wave.

Rolling Wave allows you to budget monthly and then to define a window (usually one month back and three months forward) where the budget and forecast will automatically be expanded into weekly periods. As you move forward in time and advance the calendar to different periods, the historical period data is consolidated back to monthly values and a new set of future periods is expanded. Weekly earned value using this process has the benefit of providing early warning indicators in time to apply effective correction action - because often the end of the month is too late to fix the problem. It also reduces the size of the database, enabling it to process reports faster. In addition, this process simplifies the baseline creation.

The rolling wave process splits the monthly data into weekly data for future periods and consolidates data in past periods. While running this process is only necessary at month end, it is a good practice to perform this operation each time you advance the calendar.

Note: You can perform the rolling wave without advancing the calendar. This is useful when fixing expanded date problems.

Rolling Wave does not have to be weekly earned value reporting. It can also be setup to perform bi-weekly reporting or even quarterly or monthly budgeting.

Note: Rolling wave is a common term and is sometimes used to refer to a budgeting method that makes extensive use of planning packages. The rolling wave process in Cobra is not related to this method.

Each time you advance the calendar, you should also run the rolling wave process even though rolling wave is only necessary at month end. Rolling the wave allows you to analyze earned value in weekly periods for a defined span of time and to retain the rest of the projects data in monthly periods. This process reduces the amount of data you have to deal with especially when working with long projects.