PROJECT PLANNING, SCHEDULING, AND CONTROL

References:
1. Daniel Sipper and Robert L. Bulfin, Jr., Production
Planning, Control, and Integration, McGraw-Hill
Comp. Inc., 1997.
2. Microsoft Project: http://www.microsoft.com/project

Why project planning, scheduling, and control?

Many other problems can be viewed as projects:
• moving from an old to a new plant,
• doing preventive maintenance on a machine,
• developing a product,
• building a house,
• launching a space shuttle,
• planning a political campaign,
• writing a textbook.

Their common characteristics:

• consisting of many activities,
• having a specified goal.

Definition of a Project:
A set of partially ordered, interrelated activities that
must be completed to achieve a goal.
Historical Development

• The Egyptians applied project planning, organization,

and control over 6000 years ago on the pyramids.
• Gantt Chart introduced the basic scheduling ideas of
project planning, scheduling, and control in 1911.
• In the mid-1950s, several independent research teams
developed similar approaches to project planning,
scheduling, and control. All were highly successful,
reducing both completion times and project costs 30
percent to 40 percent. These are
o The Operational Research Section of the British
Central Electricity Generating Board developed a
method to identify the critical path for reducing the
time to overhaul a generating plant in 1957.
o Employees of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation; Booz,
Alien, and Hamilton Consultants; and the U.S. Navy
cut the costs and reduce completion time on the
Polaris Weapon (Missile) System, by using PERT
to plan, schedule, and control the project in 1959.
o Du Pont and Remington Rand Univac, introduced
the basic time/cost model and Critical Path Method
(CPM) to reduce the time spent on plant overhaul,
maintenance, and construction in 1959.
• Commercial software packages developed for
mainframe computers in late 1960s and early 1970s.
• Proliferation of PC has been the dominant factor for the
last 15 years.
 Planning, Scheduling, and Control
- fundamental concepts of project management -
Planning
-- an organized approach to accomplish some goal (in this
case, the project).
• Defining project objectives
• Determine component activities and how they interact
• Estimate time and other resources required for each
activity
• Graphically represented all activities on a network.
Each activity corresponds to an arrow. If one activity
precedes another, the arrows are connected by a
node.

Scheduling
-- The time-phased commitment of resources to carry out
the project.
• Each activity is given a start time and a completion
time. These times determine the project completion
time and resource usage over time.
• The schedule identifies certain critical activities
(critical path), which, if delayed, cause the project's
completion to be delayed.

Control
-- monitoring the progress of project activities and revises
the plan accordingly after the planned and scheduled
project has start to be carried out.
Planning, Scheduling, and Control
Benefits
• Generate an in-depth consideration of the project before
anything is done (what to do and how to do it.).
o Give a clear statement of project objectives
o Specify the activities that make up the project, as
well as the time and resources required to do each
activity.
o Define interrelationships between the activities.
o Determine start and finish times of each activity

• Identify the activities are most critical to the overall

success of the project (tightly control)
• Lead to a master plan based on a global rather than
local view.
• Determines overall resource requirements throughout
the project.
• Allow "what if" planning to take place
(As the project proceeds, the expected results are
compared to what actually happens, and plans are
revised accordingly.)
• Help managers meet deadlines and budgets.
• Can be used at several levels of detail, and assigns
responsibility for each activity to a specific person.
(Communication and coordination become easier,
because all parties are working from a common base.
More realistic expectations are obtained.)
 Product Development
• A major application area of project planning, scheduling,
and control.
• Developing a new product takes a lot of time and
money.
Four major characteristics:
o Trade-offs between design parameters, cost, and
performance
o Market dynamics, e.g., change in technology and
customer needs
o Attention to detail, e.g., tolerances for each part
o Time to market
(a large number of different types of decisions)

A step-by-step procedure:
to conceive, design, and commercialize a product.
• Mission statement - identify the target market;
provides a functional description for the product and
the business goals of the effort.
• Product development
a) Concept development
b) System level design
c) Detailed design
d) Testing and refining
e) Production ramp-up
• Product launch - when the product is available for
purchase in the market.
 PLANNING
Organizing the Project
• Choose a project manager (leadership, sound
organizational skills, particularly in goal setting,
planning, and analyzing.)
• Assemble a project team of experts in their respective
areas. Team members often work on the project part-
time and continue their other duties. The project
manager should have authority to pick all members.
• Generate project plan
• Establish the reporting mechanism to check the
progress through routine meeting (verify the
completion of important events - project milestones.)

Defining Activities and the Network

• List all activities that make up the project.
Each activity should have a definite beginning and
ending point. Choose the correct level of detail for each
activity. The level of detail should be no more than is
needed to assign resources and manage the activity.
• Represent an activity by an arrow (or arc) with the tail of
the arrow corresponding to the start of the activity and
the head its completion. The duration of the activity and
a short description is often written over or under.
• Events -- the beginning and end of an activity. There is
no time duration associated with an event. Graphically,
we represent events by circles, called nodes, and label
it with a unique number.
• Precedence -- one activity cannot begin before another
is completed.

• Successor -- the activity following the predecessor.

• Project completion -- all activities with no successors
sharing an ending event, n.

• A burst event -- any node having more than one arc

leaving it.

• A merge event -- an event with more than one arc

entering it.
• A network -- a project that is represented by a collection
of nodes and arcs graphically.
(Or called an activity-on-arrow network).

• A dummy arc -- not represent an actual activity but

maintains the logic of the network. Dummies are
usually represented by dashed arcs, have no duration,
and require no resources.
 SCHEDULING
Use the network to calculate times when things might take
place (especially the project's completion).
For each activity, we calculate
o the earliest time it can start and finish
o the latest time it can start and finish.
For each event, we also calculate an earliest and latest
time for its occurrence.
Calculation methods:
• A forward pass is a sequence of calculations that
begins with the project start event and determines the
earliest time the project can be completed.
In doing so, it assigns the earliest possible start and
completion time to each activity.
• A backward pass is the reverse of the forward pass. It
assigns a desired completion time to the ending event
and calculates the latest start and completion time for
each activity so the project will be completed by the
desired time.
i-j = an activity of the project
di-j = the duration of activity i-j
Ei = the earliest time event i can occur
ESi-j = the earliest start time of activity i-j
EFi-j = its earliest finish time
LSi-j = the latest start time of activity i-j
LFi-j = the latest finish time of activity i-j
Li = the latest event time.
Forward Pass
It is used to compute the earliest start and finish time for
each activity in the project.
• The earliest finish time:
EFi-j = ESi-j + di-j
• The earliest event time:
Ek = maxall I-k EFi-k
• The earliest start of all activities with event k:
ESk-l = Ek
Backward Pass
It is used to calculate the latest allowable start and finish
times for each activity so the project is completed by a
specified time (a reverse of the forward pass). It begins
with the project completion and works toward the project
start.
• The latest start time:
LSi-j = LFi-j - di-j
• The latest event time:
Lk = minall k-j LSk-j
• The latest finish of all activities i-k:
LFi-k = Lk
Critical Path and Critical Activities
• Slack of activity i-j: Si-j = LSi-j - ESi-j (or LF i-j - EFi-j )
• A critical activity: if an activity with zero slack is not
started and completed at the earliest time, the project is
delayed.
• The critical path: path from 1 to n that has zero slack for
every activity on the path. Ln = En.
A path from project start (1) to project finish (n) formed
by the activities, 1-i, i-j,..., l-k, and k-n.
• The Critical Path Method (CPM): identifying the
bottleneck activity - each activity on the critical path.
Delaying any activity on the critical path will delay the
project.
• Near-critical activity: Ln = En-1, …

Scheduling Activities
Assigning a start time to each activity between the earliest
and latest start time for that activity.
• Early start schedule: start all activities ASAP
• Late start schedule: assign the latest start time for all.
 PROJECT CONTROL

• Three key issues: time, cost, and quality.

To ensure that the project is finished on time, within its
budget, and of required quality.
• Tools for control:
Scheduling, budgeting, and technical specifications of
the project (standards for time, cost, and quality).
• Key:
Measurement and reporting systems to monitor what
actually happens with the project.
• Schedule Control -- following and updating the network.
• Cost Control -- accurately estimate the cost of each
activity, control cost in certain ways (e.g. uniform), and
check expense with the progress of the project.
Cost/Schedule Control System Criteria (C/SCSC)
(Take into account actual and planned expenditures
and work performed, USAFSC, 1976).

• ACWP - The actual cost of work performed is the

money actually spent to accomplish the work that has
been done.
• BCWP - The budgeted cost of work performed is the
expected cost of the actual work done at this time.
• BCWS - Budgeted cost of work scheduled is the
expected cost of the work scheduled to be done at this
time.
• Cost variance: VC = BCWP - ACWP
VC > 0, spent less than anticipated.
VC < 0, over budget and cost overrun.
• Schedule variance: VS= BCWP - BCWS
VS > 0, more work than planned has been completed.
VS < 0, behind schedule.
PERT APPROACH TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT
The probabilistic approach to project management -
Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).
• A more reasonable approach: specifying an expected
project completion date (probability).
• Unfortunately, PERT requires certain assumptions,
which do not always hold.
Distribution of Activity Duration
• The duration follows some probability distribution of a
random variable, specified by the mean, µ , and
variance or standard deviation, σ .
• Three related values:
o The optimistic estimate, a
o The pessimistic estimate, b
o The most likely time, m
• [a, b] is the range of the distribution. µ and σ
calculated using a, b, m for different distributions.
• Normal, Uniform and Beta distribution are often used to
handle a large variety of distributions.

The calculations using PERT actually tend to

underestimate the project length and overestimate the
probability of completing the project by a particular time.
 Limited Resources
The CPM and PERT assume unlimited resources, while
limited human and material resources impose great impact
to project progress. Although more accurate solutions can
be obtained using linear programming, the graphic
approaches are good for rough planning.
Resource Profile (or load profile or skyline graph) simply
plots resource usage versus time for a particular schedule,
to identify any resource overuse or under use.
 Microsoft Project 2000

Introduction
• Microsoft Project 2000 is a powerful, flexible tool
designed to help you manage a full range of projects.
• Schedule and closely track all tasks
• Microsoft Project Central, the Web-based companion to
Microsoft Project 2000, to exchange project information
with your team and senior management.
Build a Project Plan

Microsoft Project 2000 helps you get started by creating a

working schedule with information you provide on tasks,
resources, and costs.
Powerful new features include custom outline codes that
allow you to create a project outline structure tailored to
your company's work breakdown structure.

Take advantage of Deadline Dates, which uses

information you provide to help you stay on track. And use
task calendars to create a schedule that factors in
resource challenges such as scheduling conflicts or
equipment downtime.
Manage a Project
• Once you've planned your project, you can easily
review and analyze its progress using the advanced
management features in Microsoft Project 2000.
• Custom fields allow you to enter project-specific data;
views and tables display exactly the information you
want to review; and
• Filters and groups help you prioritize and focus on
what's important.

• Network Diagram enhancements let you customize

the display of the Network Diagram, and view specific
information without using add-on tools.