A PM whodunnit: The mysterious death of Earned Value…

The Case Background

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Earned Value Management (EVM) occupied a central place in professional project management. It was taught, standardised, examined, and applied across defence, infrastructure, engineering, and large IT programmes.

Earned Value was not a fringe technique; it was a mainstream mechanism for answering the most fundamental project questions: Where are we really? How much will this cost? When will we finish?

I remember as a project manager in the early 2000’s working on the NHS IT Project in the U.K. (the largest IT project in the world at that point) and Earned Value was suffused throughout the programme.

Today, Earned Value is rarely discussed outside specialist environments. It does not feature prominently in everyday project status conversations, agile delivery forums, or even on executive dashboards.

What happened?

What caused the mysterious death of Earned Value?

Who Benefited from Earned Value’s Disappearance?

Earned Value’s defining characteristic was its open and transparent reporting mechanism.

By combining scope, schedule, and cost into a single analytical framework, it exposed performance problems early and quantified their likely consequences.

This made it invaluable for governance.

However, it also made it deeply uncomfortable for organisations and individuals invested in optimistic narratives.

As project management matured into an executive-facing discipline, the appetite for uncomfortable numerical truth diminished.

Earned Value constrained the optimistic narrative that had been established.

Project Managers loved it because it reduced ambiguity, it created traceable accountability.

But in environments where careers and project funding were at stake, this open and honest transparency became a liability rather than an asset.

Unlike in Agatha Christie’s ‘The Orient Express’ there is no evidence of a coordinated effort to remove Earned Value from practice.

Instead, the motive is structural and cultural. Earned Value surfaced bad news early and was therefore sidelined in favour of those that preserved plausible deniability.

Sources:
PMI – The Standard for Earned Value Management provides an overview of Earned Value Management’s purpose and its role in predictive cost and schedule performance measurement:
https://www.pmi.org/standards/earned-value-management

GAO – Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide (The article explains why EVM is valuable for early warning and forecasting):
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-195g

Where was the opportunity to remove Earned Value?

The opportunity for Earned Value’s disappearance emerged during the widespread adoption of agile delivery methods from the mid-2000s onward.

Agile emphasizes adaptability, customer value, and incremental delivery.

In many organisations, however, this philosophy was misapplied as a justification for abandoning baselines, long-range forecasting, and cost-to-scope traceability.

Earned Value depends on a defined baseline and disciplined measurement.

When scope became fluid, estimates relative, and funding decoupled from deliverables, the structural supports Earned Value required were removed.

In their place emerged lightweight indicators that focused on activity rather than outcome.

The Agile transformation years were critical.

Earned Value lost its protection and supporters during a period of upheaval, when established controls and methodologies were dismantled faster than new ones were put in place.

Sources:
Digital.ai – 17th State of Agile Report (documents widespread agile adoption):
https://digital.ai/resource-center/analyst-reports/state-of-agile-report

PMI – Agile Practice Guide (illustrates the shift in emphasis away from traditional baselining):
https://www.pmi.org/pmbok-guide-standards/practice-guides/agile

How Earned Value Was Quietly Removed

Earned Value was not replaced by any superior forecasting method.

Instead, it was edged out through a gradual substitution of softer metrics.

Red-Amber-Green (RAG) status reporting, confidence percentages, milestone tracking, and narrative dashboards became dominant.

These tools are easy to consume and politically safer, but they do not provide mathematical forecasts of final cost or schedule.

This shift is visible in public-sector governance.

Major project portfolios routinely publish RAG ratings as headline indicators, even while acknowledging that these ratings often fail to predict eventual outcomes.

RAG reporting does not measure value earned, it signals sentiment.

Modern delivery tools capture vast amounts of data but present it in ways that obscured earned value logic.

Velocity, burn-down charts, and flow metrics describe throughput, not delivery efficiency against plan. Corporate dashboards no longer expose the fundamental EV measurements of Planned Value, Earned Value and Actual Cost.

Sources:
Infrastructure and Projects Authority Annual Report 2023–24 (UK Govt.):
Official annual report from the IPA on the Government Major Projects Portfolio, showing performance and ratings (including delivery confidence assessments such as Red, Amber, Green):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/infrastructure-and-projects-authority-annual-report-2023-24

Victorian Auditor-General – Major Projects Performance Reporting (use of traffic-light status):
https://www.audit.vic.gov.au

Supporting Evidence: Declining Visibility of Earned Value

In 2011, the PMI reported that approximately 37% of organisations used Earned Value management techniques always or often, indicating that it was still a mainstream practice at that time.

However, in more recent times, the PMI Pulse of the Profession reports that Earned Value is no longer in the foreground as a core technique.

Greater emphasis is placed on business outcomes, value delivery, and leadership capability.

This does not prove abandonment, but it does demonstrate declining prominence.

Earned Value moved from the dashboard to the appendix.

Sources:
PMI – Pulse of the Profession®: Capturing the Value of Project Management (2015) :
https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/pulse-of-the-profession-2015.pdf

PMI – Pulse of the Profession 2025 (focus on business acumen and outcomes):
https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/pulse

Did Things Improve After Earned Value’s demise?

If the reporting of Earned Value were the problem, project outcomes should have improved after its decline.

The evidence does not support this conclusion.

Longitudinal studies show that project success rates have remained stubbornly inconsistent over decades.

While definitions vary, a significant proportion of projects continue to miss cost, schedule, or business-outcome targets. PMI consistently reports substantial wasted investment due to poor project performance well into the 2020s.

The removal of Earned Value did not usher in a golden age of project delivery.

Sources:
PMI — Pulse of the Profession 2018: Success in Disruptive Times
https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/pulse-of-the-profession-2018Project Management Institute

PMI – Pulse of the Profession 2020 (wasted investment due to poor performance):
https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/pulse

Conclusion

Earned Value was not undone by technical failure, but choice.

The motive for its elimination lay in the uncomfortable truths it consistently exposed about cost efficiency and schedule performance.

The opportunity arose when large-scale agile transformations dismantled the structural conditions Earned Value depended upon, removing baselines, fixed scope, and time-phased budgets.

The method was subtler than outright rejection, with Earned Value quietly displaced by softer, narrative-friendly indicators that favoured storytelling over measurement.

So, is that the end of the story?

Can we wrap up the case?

The Victim Is Still Alive!
Despite appearances, Earned Value has never been truly eliminated.

It continues to operate in defence, infrastructure, and other capital-intensive environments, often under different names.

Concepts such as the Performance Measurement Baseline, Integrated Project Controls, Milestone-based Progress tracking, Forecast accuracy, Investment performance, and Delivery Confidence all draw directly from the logic of Earned Value, even when the discipline of EVM itself is no longer explicitly acknowledged.

RIP EVM?