For more than five decades, Earned Value Management Systems (EVMS) have been applied by organizations to manage their projects in different industries. However, many organizations still struggle to apply Earned Value Management (EVM) techniques to assess and reliably control their project outcomes. This work investigated the state of practice of EVMS. This paper identifies challenges facing practitioners, critical EVMS subprocesses, and key EVMS environment factors, based on a large survey of 294 expert respondents. Sample respondents had project management experience of greater than 20 years on average, and represented a diverse set of projects and industries (e.g., capital projects, aerospace, defense, energy, and others). The responses from this survey helped craft an agreed-upon set of definitions for EVM, EVMS, EVMS maturity, and EVMS environment that are all provided in this paper. Moreover, out of 10 total EVMS subprocesses, planning and scheduling was ranked as the subprocess with the greatest impact on EVMS, by far. When ranking the top factors that impact the EVMS environment, the following factors rose to the top: organizational culture; efficient EVMS development process; leadership's past EVMS experience; effective and accountable leadership; and quality and level of data available. Moreover, leadership attitude toward EVMS was found to be the most critical EVMS challenge, by a wide margin. Comparing different perspectives, the data showed that project/program owners consider EVM implementation costs to be a major challenge, while contractors and consultants consider adequate calendar time needed for preparing EVMS to be a critical EVMS environment factor. Overall, this paper contributes to the engineering management body of knowledge by identifying the most important subprocesses and factors of a high-performing EVMS applied to a diverse array of complex projects and programs (e.g., aerospace, defense, construction, software, etc.

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Earned value management (EVM) is a project management approach that can enhance the probability of project success. It is applied widely across different industry sectors (e.g., energy, aerospace, construction, defense, and manufacturing), generally through the use of an earned value management system (EVMS). A holistic and up-to-date literature review on EVM and EVMS does not exist. A literature review can provide a comprehensive perspective on the topic, identifying and summarizing the existing body of knowledge, as a foundation to advance the state of practice of EVM/EVMS. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to investigate the EVM/EVMS state of the art by critically reviewing academic and industry publications, with a specific focus on the maturity of EVMS and the environment surrounding its implementation. By performing a systematic literature review, the authors identified 600 publications since the inception of the EVM concept in 1962, and then narrowed down this list to 160 relevant publications from the last decade for closer review. The findings include the discovery of eight emergent themes. Of these themes, "forecasting/prediction" constitutes the largest portion of the recent literature, followed by "application of EVMS." One interesting finding is that EVMS maturity, although being a critical topic, is only discussed in one publication. Publications focused on EVM/EVMS have increased in the last decade and significant differences were found between academia and industry literature in terms of the limitations and extensions of EVM/EVMS, EVMS environment, and compliance. A key finding is that designing a reliable EVMS should combine both technical and social aspects of implementation. This forward-looking paper provides a state-of-the-art review while highlighting gaps in the existing EVM/EVMS body of knowledge and introducing new perspectives to support EVMS research and application.