When it is of interest monitoring small changes in the variability (and/or the mean) of a process, the EWMA control charts have shown to be very efficient. These charts, usually use the generalized variance as a measure of global variability, defined as the determinant of the variance covariance matrix. Peña & Rodríguez (2003) proposed a measure of overall variability, called effective variance, defined to p variates as the pth root of the generalized variance, which, in some scenarios of multivariate analysis, offers some advantages over the