A computer application for scheduling in MS Project

Abstract

The project management field has shown great progress over the last decades. With technology evolution, project managers as well as other managers have a faster and more efficient way to handle information. While progress brought more abilities to managers, it also brought them more requirements, and an increasingly higher level of minimum accepted quality. The development and usage of new scheduling techniques became therefore imperative, so that better results could be achieved. In this research, four scheduling techniques well documented in the literature were studied: Early Start Schedule, Late Start Schedule, Constructive Heuristics and Branch-and-Bound. The main objective of this research project was to integrate these scheduling techniques into commercially available software, in order to help project managers deal with scheduling tasks in a more easy and controlled way. These scheduling techniques were integrated as an add-in, coded with C# programming language, for Microsoft Project 2010. After developing the add-in, an experimental phase was performed, in which the software was tested using some example projects. The initial hypothesis was confirmed by the results. For the tested projects the conclusion was that it was possible to get better results, concerning the project’s duration, using the studied techniques rather than the default scheduling technique used by Microsoft Project 2010.