Measuring the accuracy of earned value/earned schedule forecasting predictors

Earned value systems have been setup to deal with the complex task of controlling and adjusting the baseline project schedule during execution, taking into account project scope, timed delivery and total project budget. Although earned value systems have been proven to provide reliable estimates for the follow-up of cost performance within certain project assumptions, it often fails to predict the total duration of the project. In the current paper, a brief overview and summary is given of a simulation study that investigates the potential of three earned value based methods to forecast the final project duration. The study assumes a project setting where project activities and precedence relations are known in advance and do not consider fundamentally unforeseeable events and/or unknown interactions among various actions that might cause entirely unexpected effects in different project parts. This is the first paper in a sequence of papers that summarizes the results of the large simulation study initiated by the study of Vanhoucke and Vandevoorde (2007). Each paper will discuss and highlight another aspect of the simulation study.