Earned value forecast accuracy and activity criticality

This paper presents new simulation results on the forecast accuracy of earned value based metrics to predict a project’s final duration. This is the second paper in a series of papers based on the simulation study initially proposed by Vanhoucke and Vandevoorde (2007b). In a previous manuscript published in the Measurable News (Vanhoucke and Vandevoorde, 2007a), it has been shown that the earned schedule method outperforms, on average, the more traditional earned value based methods to predict the final duration of a project, both for early and late projects. In the current manuscript, the simulation study is extended to new simulation scenarios that measure the influence of inaccuracies in the planned duration estimates for critical and non-critical activities on the accuracy of forecasting methods.