Earned Value is Critical to Meaningful Progress Reporting

So we are 50% through the project from a time perspective and 50% of the budget is utilised. How many times have we seen this reported as GREEN from a RAG status. In truth this is meaningless. We need to understand effort and resource utilised and effort and resource remaining. Have we spend the resources we have expected for the deliverables achieved and do we have the resources and effort remaining in the budget to complete on time and budget ? We could easily be 50% through the planned time and 50% through the planned budget and only have delivered 10% of the Business Case outcomes. We must track the level of work completed and level of work remaining - so we need to accurately track effort and %Complete. IF we are not doing this then progress reporting against plan and budget cannot be meaningful.