An Extension of the Earned Value Management to Improve the Accuracy of Schedule Analysis Results

A project is any endeavor involving planned action, for example, developing a new product or constructing a dam. [CE1] Major factors for a project to be successful are applying performance measurement and feedback tool. One such well-known performance measurement tool to control the project execution is earned value management (EVM). EVM uses the fundamental principle that trends in the past can be good predictors of the future. It was originally developed to follow time and cost of a project, but it has some weak points in analyzing the time performance of a project. In this article, we first explain these weak points in detail. Then, to improve them, we develop two methods: the first one is a simple and approximation method to minimize errors in EVM analysis with a high probability and the second method is an exact approach that uses earned value and floating time concepts. At the end, the performance of the proposed methods is evaluated and analyzed on a set of instances containing a variety of project sizes. The results of this experimentation show that the efficiency of the methods is relatively good.