Need for and Benefits of Additional Real-World Project Modeling Capabilities
Robert Richards · 2023
Project management tools provide various capabilities for modeling and analyzing projects and or a portfolio of projects, these tools provide methods for modeling tasks, their relationships to each other, e.g., finish-to-start constraints, the resources that are available, assignment of resources to tasks, calendars for resources and tasks, and various other modeling capabilities. These capabilities provide a great foundation for modeling many types of projects, and in many cases provide all the modeling capabilities necessary to execute the project successfully. However, there are many cases where without further real-world project modeling capabilities, the human project managers will be overwhelmed by the inaccuracies of the resulting schedule during execution since so many real-world details are not taken into consideration. For example, NASA and others have benefited from hazard constraints, this constraint allows the modeling of hazardous activities in conjunction with the activities it is hazardous to, then during execution hazardous activities will never occur simultaneously with any of the activities it is hazardous to. Without this constraint, the project manager would need to determine the order of activities during planning and put in finish-to-start constraints to control the ordering, however, during execution if the ordering should be updated the human scheduler would need to constantly check if the ordering should be updated to maximize throughput. Another real-world project modeling capability, preference, is useful and many times necessary to maximize project efficiency. A preference constraint can have many different incarnations. For example, there are many cases where an activity may be associated with a specific organization, such as a shop, however, it is not absolutely necessary that the activity be performed by that organization. So, a preference constraint could be associated with activities that are preferred to be done with SHOPA, but if SHOPA is at capacity and SHOPB or SHOPC is not then the scheduling tool would schedule the activity in SHOPB or SHOPC, maximizing utilization and throughput while maintaining activities in their preferred shop as much as possible. Other types of modeling capabilities that are important include shift-based resource constraints. For example, there are situations where work should not be performed if it is likely to span more than one shift. Another shift-related case is for activities that do span multiple shifts, sometimes due to the nature of the activity they should be performed by some or all of the same human resources. There are other cases, some painting situations, where if it takes more than one shift to complete completely different people can work on completing the activity. There is a plethora of other modeling capabilities that have been found to be useful/necessary to model and execute projects efficiently. This paper will draw from a diverse range of domains ranging from aerospace to manufacturing to pharmaceutical production to mortgage audit scheduling, demonstrating how better modeling leads to better outcomes and how generally applicable these modeling options are to most domains.