Mario Vanhoucke – författare

Meant to complement rather than compete with the existing books on the subject, this book deals with the project performance and control phases of the project life cycle to present a detailed investigation of the project’s time performance measurement methods and risk analysis techniques in order to evaluate existing and newly developed methods in terms of their abilities to improve the corrective actions decision-making process during project tracking. As readers apply what is learned from the book, EVM practices will become even more effective in project management and cost engineering. Individual chapters look at simulation studies in forecast accuracy; schedule adherence; time sensitivity; activity sensitivity; and using top-down or bottom-up project tracking. Vanhoucke also offers an actual real-life case study, a tutorial on the use of ProTrack software (newly developed based on his research) in EVM, and conclusions on the relative effectiveness for each technique presented.

This book comprehensively assesses the growing importance of project data for project scheduling, risk analysis and control. It discusses the relevance of project data for both researchers and professionals, and illustrates why the collection, processing and use of such data is not as straightforward as most people think. The theme of this book is known in the literature as data-driven project management and includes the discussion of using computer algorithms, human intuition, and project data for managing projects under risk.

Based on the shared journey of two researchers, this book explores enhancing algorithms for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem. It examines the search for and significance of project data from multiple, distinct perspectives. In the first part, the quest for project data is presented as a continuous exploration of the complexity of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem. This quest is pursued by solving this challenging problem with the aid of state-of-the-art algorithms from the literature, each time gaining a deeper understanding of its challenging nature.

To provide insights into the problem’s complexity, project data is created, manipulated, and analyzed in depth to make current projects easier or harder to schedule.

This challenging quest for project data has resulted in new project databases for academic research, new ways of testing future algorithms, and insights into how to improve future algorithms to solve this project scheduling problem with limited resources. In turn, the second part discusses the relevance of project data, demonstrating to the reader the importance of the academic research presented in the first part for the professional world. It shows how project data can be used to calibrate real project data, leading to improved decision-making, e.g. for project scheduling, forecasting, and risk analysis.

The book extends a warm invitation to academics and practitioners alike, as fellow seekers of knowledge, to enhance their project management skills.

This book presents an integrated approach to monitoring projects in progress using Earned Value and Earned Schedule Management combined with Schedule Risk Analysis. Monitoring and controlling projects involves processes for identifying potential problems in a timely manner. When necessary, corrective actions can be taken to exploit project opportunities or to get faltering projects back on track. The prerequisite is that project performance is observed and measured regularly to identify variances from the project baseline schedule. Therefore, monitoring the performance of projects in progress requires a set of tools and techniques that should ideally be combined into a single integrated system. The book offers a valuable resource for anyone who wants to understand the theory first and then to use it in practice with software tools. It is intended for students, professionals and academics with an interest and/or experience in running projects as well as for newcomers in the area of project control with a basic grasp of the Earned Value, Earned Schedule and Schedule Risk Analysis concepts.

This handbook is a unique,comprehensive resource for professional project managers and students inproject management courses that focuses on the integration between baselinescheduling, schedule risk analysis and project control, also known as DynamicScheduling or Integrated Project Management and Control. It contains a set ofmore than 70 articles. Each individual article focuses on one particular topic andfeatures links to other articles in this book, where appropriate. Almost allarticles are accompanied with a set of questions, the answers to which are providedat the end of the book.

The topic of this book is known as dynamic scheduling, and is used to refer to three dimensions of project management and scheduling: the construction of a baseline schedule and the analysis of a project schedule’s risk as preparation of the project control phase during project progress. This dynamic scheduling point of view implicitly assumes that the usability of a project’s baseline schedule is rather limited and only acts as a point of reference in the project life cycle. Consequently, a project schedule should especially be considered as nothing more than a predictive model that can be used for resource efficiency calculations, time and cost risk analyses, project tracking and performance measurement, and so on.

In this book, the three dimensions of dynamic scheduling are highlighted in detail and are based on and inspired by a combination of academic research studies at Ghent University (www.ugent.be), in-company trainings at Vlerick Business School (www.vlerick.com) andconsultancy projects at OR-AS (www.or-as.be). First, the construction of a project baseline schedule is a central theme throughout the various chapters of the book, and is discussed from a complexity point of view with and without the presence of project resources. Second, the creation of an awareness of the weak parts in a baseline schedule is discussed at the end of the two baseline scheduling parts as schedule risk analysis techniques that can be applied on top of the baseline schedule. Third, the baseline schedule and its risk analyses can be used as guidelines during the project control step where actual deviations can be corrected within the margins of the project’s time and cost reserves.

The second edition of this book has seen corrections, additions and amendments in detail throughout the book. Moreover Chapter 15 on "Dynamic Scheduling with ProTrack" has been completely rewritten and extended with a section on "ProTrack as a research tool".