Comparison and Assessment of Using Primavera and Microsoft Project in Construction Projects in Erbil City

Abstract

Planning and scheduling has an important role in construction projects because of the increasing complexities in the field of project management comprises, pre-construction planning in order to schedule the activities sequence, defining labor tasks, construction methods and assigning the resources and responsibilities. For planning and scheduling work a huge amount of paperwork is required, which makes the construction management task more complicated. This paper provides a comparison study to currently available project management tools and assessing Primavera and Microsoft project, to identify the most popular planning project tools. Consequently, to developed criteria to compare primavera with Microsoft project, and to investigate the current situation of using Primavera and Microsoft project in Erbil governorate. The result of the analysis the questionnaire data revealed that 78% of respondents were reluctant to use Primavera and Microsoft project in construction projects in Erbil governorate. Consequently, the most of respondents preferred to use Excel Microsoft for managing project because of its availability and easy in using, on other hand, the respondent’s knowledge regarding the most advantages program, the study revealed that 76% of the respondents they do not know which program is best one and the most of respondents suffer from lack of experience and lack of training opportunity to tackle and learning primavera and Microsoft project. Furthermore, most of the respondents preferred using the traditional process rather than software to schedule by hand instead of using Primavera and Microsoft project.