ABSTRACT
There cannot be many who practise in the field of project management who haven’t brushed against earned value performance measurement at some point in their careers. For some it will be one of those techniques that was studied as part of a project management course but that was as far as it went, while for others it will be part of their normal project activities. One suspects that the latter group are still in the minority despite the fact that earned value methods have been around for about forty years. The obvious question must be why is it that a technique that has some real advantages for project managers has been largely ignored for so long, even though many in the profession are fully aware of it? Of course the answers are never simple but it cannot be denied that the technique gained a tarnished reputation from its early history and the way that it was first implemented in the United States. The popular view was that it was complex, bureaucratic, costly, peppered with alien terms and acronyms and something that one just wouldn’t employ unless forced to do so. Not surprisingly, very little use was made of it outside the USA during its first thirty years but, since 1990, a more enlightened approach has developed along with suitable software tools that have made the technique appealing to a much wider audience.
