Effective expediting to improve project due date and cost performance through buffer management

Abstract

The rapidly changing marketplace together with the increasing complexity of contemporary projects makes it more likely that project activities will have uncertain durations, incurring a generally low probability of on-time delivery. Thus, project control that aims to track the project performance and to expedite relevant activities when necessary has become the main aspect within the scope of project management in order to ensure a successful scheduling outcome. The Critical Chain Scheduling and Buffer Management (CC/BM) has shown to provide a popular approach to build robust project schedules and to offer a valuable control tool for coping with schedule variability. However, the most current buffer management (BM) practice faces a problem of neglecting the cost information when taking expediting actions. In view of this defect, we introduce a new control procedure on the basis of CC/BM that evaluates the probability of successful project completion relative to the cost of crashing and that determines when to expedite which activities in a cost-effective manner. Results of an experimental application of the proposed method present its relative dominance over the currently widely adopted BM approach with respect to project time and cost performance.

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