Earned quality: improving project control

Abstract

The concept of earned value has been widely used in project management to measure and control the achievement of time and cost objectives. However, no such equivalent concept has ever been devised to assess and monitor the quality of a project. The goal of the paper is to propose a multiattribute utility theory approach that enables project managers to measure and estimate the monetary value of a project's accumulated quality attributes. To that effect the concept of earned quality has been devised as a tool for assessing and controlling quality throughout a project's life cycle.