Track: Project Management

Abstract

Shortening the project duration (crashing of projects) sometimes is necessary function of project management.  This is achieved by applying additional resources to the project activities. Benefits of crashing may be in the form of specified rewards in the contract for completing the project ahead of time or transferring resources to other projects. There are two basic methods for performing project crashing: The first method is the linear programming method. It offers an excellent optimization tool when the relationship between cost and time reduction is linear.  However, using this method requires project managers to have good knowledge of optimization.  The second method is the Critical Path Method (CPM) that is usually used for manual crashing of small networks. However, this method becomes cumbersome when many parallel critical paths exist. The objective of this research is to develop decision support tool that automates the  CPM steps of project crashing. The developed tool is easy to use, windows oriented, and it has a wide range of capabilities such as: file saving, retrieving, modifying, and reporting. Moreover, the tool allows crashing projects that has a large number of activities. The tool was validated using several small and large project examples.