Resource constraint scheduling in multi project environment: Analysis and recommendations for a specific multi project network

Abstract

Working with a limited number of human resources in a company that deals with different products and services that require mostly human capital, appears to be the most challenging scheduling problems that many firms are facing today. In the absence of any general scheduling algorithm to solve the resource constraint problem, many firms leave this task almost entirely to the project manager, who uses his intuition and back of the envelope calculation to arrive at an acceptable scheduling program which fits his company’s objectives and are aligned with his particular set of constraints. In this report, we have looked at a particular company and its multi project environment and the resource constraints with which it works. The challenge was to come up with a better scheduling algorithm or at least suggest some innovative methods of improving the current schedule. Therefore, equipped with the actual data from the company about its various projects, their inception dates, expected time to completion, organizational hierarchy, activity network and dependencies, we have tried to play around with various input handles that are usually available with a product manager to objectively evaluate based on certain performance criteria, various recommendations that we had suggested, after an exhaustive analysis of the network structure at hand. Once the recommendations have been defined and evaluated objectively, the project manager is free to choose from a list of recommendations (or a combination of various recommendations) that suit his team and working culture. Care has been taken to give the rationale for making any recommendation such that the project manager doesn’t rely too much on the numbers as mentioned in this report, which are meant only for the purposes of illustration (and are very specific to one network, as studied as a part of this project).