Extensions of earned value management: Using the earned incentive metric to improve signal quality

This research introduces novel control metrics for projects that use cost and/or time incentives. The proposed technique extends the traditional earned value management (EV M) methodology for project control. This is done by measuring the deviation in the accrual of incentives, rather than the time and cost performance relative to the planned schedule. The proposed dedicated approach avoids two key issues when controlling incentivized projects using traditional earned value management. Firstly, the impact of variations in the cost and time dimensions are adequately weighted in the control signals. Secondly, the technique is capable of monitoring the potential non-linear accrual of incentive amounts throughout the project. The performance of the proposed technique is tested by means of a computational experiment on 4200 projects of varying size, structure and type of incentive contract. The results show that the proposed technique improves signal quality when compared to traditional EV M metrics.