Using earned value management and schedule risk analysis with resource constraints for project control

Abstract

The main goal of project control is to measure the actual project progress such that the deviations from the plan can be identified and corrective actions can be taken to bring the project back on track. However, in resource-constrained projects, disrupted activities affect their successors due to precedence relations and the other activities due to resource constraints, both of which will result in deviations during project progress. Since the project control approaches solely focus on the deviations based on the network analysis, they do not accurately reflect the progress of resource-constrained projects.

This paper extends project control approaches for resource-constrained projects to measure and evaluate whether the project progress is acceptable. Moreover, we design three scenarios considering possible resource conflicts to take corrective actions when needed. In the computational experiment, this project control process is applied to a large set of projects with different characteristics and further validated on real-life project data. The results show that the proposed scenarios and different project control approaches are efficient and reliable, but their use depends on project network structure and resource scarceness.