Abstract
Flexible agile and extreme project management methods have become increasingly popular among practitioners, particularly in the IT and R&D sectors. In contrast to the theoretically and algorithmically well-established and developed trade-off and multimode methods applied in traditional project management methods, flexible project scheduling methods, which are applied in agile, hybrid, and especially extreme project management, lack a principled foundation and algorithmic handling. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap. We propose a matrix-based method that provides scores for alternative project plans that host flexible task dependencies and undecided, supplementary task completion while also handling the new but unplanned tasks. In addition, traditional multimode resource-constrained project scheduling problems are also covered. The proposed method can bridge the flexible and traditional approaches.
Highlights
The importance of scheduling and resource allocation problems in project management was recognized over five decades ago
Traditional Project Management agents (TPMa) represents the traditional project management approach, where every task and all tasks are included in the project; we obtain either the traditional continuous version of the time–quality–cost trade-off problem (CTQCTP) or an multimode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP) problem
In the flexible project environment when unplanned tasks can be included in the project, Hybrid Project Management agent (HPMa) is equivalent to Application Management agent (AMa) if constraints are fixed, but HPMa = XPMa if the constraint is flexible
Summary
The importance of scheduling and resource allocation problems in project management was recognized over five decades ago (see excellent reviews in Brucker et al [2], Habibi et al [11]). From the beginning of the 1960s until recently, researchers usually assumed tradeoff functions between both the time and the cost and between the time and the resources (see, e.g., [20]) (see Fig. 1a) and later, among the time, the cost and the quality [1,18]. 10, Veszprém, Hungary 2 Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Information Technology, University of Pannonia, Egyetem str. Researchers later investigated the discrete version of trade-off methods (see, e.g., [5,7,25]). Despite the ease of use, the main concern of the concept of continuous trade-off problems (CTP) is that it is usually hard to specify continuous trade-off functions between the time and the cost, the time and resources, or the cost and the quality. Decision makers instead choose from technologies (in addition to completion modes) (see Fig. 1b, c)
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