Project Management: Achieving Competitive Advantage, Fifth Edition

Earned Value Management

1. LO 13.3 Understand how Earned Value Management can assist project tracking and evaluation.

An increasingly popular method used in project monitoring and control consists of a mechanism that has become known as Earned Value Management (EVM).* The origins of EVM date to the 1960s, when U.S. government contracting agencies began to question the ability of contractors to accurately track their costs across the life of various projects. As a result, after 1967 the Department of Defense imposed 35 Cost/Schedule Control Systems Criteria that suggested, in effect, that any future projects procured by the U.S. government in which the risk of cost growth was to be retained by the government must satisfy these 35 criteria.2 In ...