How It All Began
The Creation of Earned Value
and the Evolution of C/SPCS and C/SCSC

Editor’s note: Second Editions are papers that have been previously published that have continued relevance and deserve additional visibility.  The paper below was originally published in the 4^th Quarter 2009 edition of the Measurable News, published by the PMI College of Performance Management (PMI-CPM).  This paper is included here with the permission of the author, who is copyright holder.

But for the talent and dedication of a couple of visionaries, EVMS would likely not have even occurred or continued as the core performance measurement methodology for program management.  With the passing of one of these visionaries, Gen. Hans ‘Whitey’ Driessnack in 2006, I was reminded of how much he contributed to the development of the Cost/Schedule Control System Criteria (C/SCSC), and his support from the 1970’s to his passing.  I was also reminded of the visionary who actually created Earned Value and the need to document how and why it was created, how it morphed to the Air Force’s Cost/Schedule Planning and Control Specification (C/SPCS), and then to C/SCSC. 

This is the story of those original efforts – the provenance, as the antique collectors like to say, of today’s Earned Value Management System (EVMS).

Starting as a Concept …

Earned Value, as it was originally titled, was the creation of A. Ernest ‘Ernie’ Fitzgerald, a name well known inside the Beltway, but not so well known outside.  Ernie was an Industrial Engineering graduate of the University of Alabama with an extensive knowledge of work measurement…


To read entire paper (click here)