What is it about?
Project management schedules the activities in a project to meet fixed targets for completion time, project cost and project scope. But in many applications, there aren't fixed targets. Instead the project manager is making tradeoffs between completion time, cost and scope in order to maximize an overall utility function. This paper shows how very minor changes in existing project management procedures can enable project management with fixed targets to address these more complex objective functions.
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Why is it important?
Project management with fixed targets is widely used by millions of professionals across the world. However the assumption of fixed deadlines, a fixed budget and a fixed scope are not always appropriate. This paper provides an easy way of overcoming this limitation.
Perspectives
There are strong theoretical reasons why most problems should be solved by optimizing an objective function and not be simply trying to satisfy fixed targets. But there are strong practical reasons why it is often easier to solve problems by setting fixed targets. The aim of this paper is to get the theoretical benefits of using an objective function along with the practice benefits of formulating problems using fixed targets.
Dr Robert F Bordley
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Project Management Decisions with Uncertain Targets, Decision Analysis, March 2015, INFORMS,
DOI: 10.1287/deca.2014.0305.
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