Improving Earned Value Management and Earned Schedule by Statistical Quality Control Charts Considering the Dependence between Cost and Schedule

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a technique that provides decision-makers with efficient control, analysis, and monitoring of the performance as well as the progress of a project to prevent delays and cost overruns. Earned Schedule (ES), as an extension of EVM, is introduced to deal with the problems of EVM schedule performance indicators. Using statistical quality control principles has proved to enhance the efficiency of EVM and ES. In previous approaches, schedule and cost indicators were considered independent indices, and thus the relationship between these two variables was ignored. The failure to take into account the dependency between dependent parameters can result in unrealistic and misleading results. Therefore, in the proposed approach, the relationship between two basic elements of EVM and ES, i.e. time and cost is also considered in order to more precisely analyze the results obtained from these methods. This paper proposes a multivariate quality control chart (MQCC) alongside univariate quality control charts (UQCCs) for analyzing, managing, and monitoring projects to improve the capability, accuracy, and efficiency of EVM and ES. Furthermore, to show the applicability and superiority of the proposed approach, three construction projects as case studies were applied. . The results show considerable improvement.