Project duration controlling methods: an earned value analysis approach
- Vol.26(1), Jan-Mar
- Pune NICMAR 2011
- 51-64p.
Earned value project management is a well-known management system that integrates cost, schedule and technical performance. It allows the calculation of cost and schedule variances and performance indices and forecasts of project cost and schedule duration. The earned value method provides early indications of project performance to highlight the need for eventual corrective action. Earned value management was originally developed for cost management and has not widely been used for forecasting project duration. However, recent research trends show an increase of interest to use performance indicators for predicting total project duration. Project management and its related processes are the keys to staying organized and focused, and to accomplishing the solutions a community needs after being hit by a disaster. Reconstruction project management is about solving problems and delivering intended results through an organized, structured methodology. During execution of reconstruction projects many a time project management methods and tools like earned value (cost loaded schedule with focus on cost to complete) is missed out or not taken into consideration thus, the study focuses on traditional EVM methods compared with different methods to be used for predicting project duration. It is very significant to complete any task or project within planned time duration and cost. Schedule variance is an important concept in EVM to monitor & control actual work, but there are some criticisms associated with it. So substitute methods have to be found out to control the project duration, which can be effectively applied during execution of project and will give us accurate result. The purpose of this paper is to compare the classic earned value performance indicators SV and SPI with the newly developed earned schedule performance indicators SV(t) and SPI(t). Next objective is, to present a generic schedule forecasting formula applicable in different project situations and compare the three methods from literature to forecast total project duration. Finally, application of the use of each method on a simple real-life project data is presented.