Implementing earned value easily and effectively

Earned value is a powerful approach for evaluating true project performance. It also provides a quantitative basis for estimating actual completion time and actual cost at completion. However, the effective use of this technique is rare outside of the U.S. government and its contractors. There are several reasons for this general lack of use. This paper presents the implementation problems and also some methodology and specific techniques to overcome each of these problems, thus providing an effective and relatively easy implementation of earned value.