Nowadays, with the increasing number of projects in organizations, managers are enthusiastic about managing and controlling projects, and as projects become more complex and cause unforeseen risks, project management becomes even more critical. Using the earned value management method to control the current status of projects, and predicting the future status of projects has had many advantages. Representing the status of the project, and predicting the project performance by various indicators are some features of this method. As these indicators are deterministic, the risk of the prediction increases when the number of risks goes up in a project. Therefore, statistical methods can be employed to estimate the statistical distribution of risks and notably boost predicting accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to present a method for predicting project duration and cost of the project and selecting the best action plan. Control charts are used along with the earned value management method to increase accuracy. This model also provides the possibility of selecting the best action plan to improve project performance. Moreover, this method can be applied in each project phase separately. Finally, a case study is used to investigate the validity of the proposed method.

In construction cost management system, normally earned value management (EVM) is applied as an efficient control approach in both status detection and estimation at completion (EAC) cost forecasting. The traditional approaches in EAC predictions normally extend the current situation of a project to the future by employing pervious performance factor. The proposed approach of this paper considers both qualitative and quantitative factors affecting the EAC prediction. The proposed approach of this research not only estimates the completion of the project, but also it can generate accurate forecast for the entire future periods using a fuzzy neural network model. The model is also implemented for a real-world case study and yields encouraging preliminary results.

Earned Value Management (EVM) has been a well-known methodology used since the 1960s when the US department of defense proposed a standard method to measure project performance. This system relies on a set of often straightforward metrics to measure and evaluate the general health of a project. These metrics serve as early warning signals to timely detect project problems, or to exploit project opportunities. A key aspect of EVM is to estimate the completion cost of a project by considering both cost and schedule performance indices. However, good performance of cost and schedule performance indices does not necessarily guarantee cost effectiveness of the project regardless of the overhead costs. The reason is because, in most project-based organizations, overhead costs constitute a significant proportion of the total costs. However, EVM indices are usually calculated in the absence of the so-called overhead costs. This paper, first, seeks to remedy this problem by proposing a practical procedure of allocating overhead costs in project-based organizations. Then the traditional EVM indices are revised by consider-ing the allocated overhead costs. Finally, a case study demonstrates the applicability of the proposed method for a real-life project.