Modeling and Simulating Coordination in Projects

A main challenge in managing projects is identification and understanding of interactions between subtasks. These interactions give rise to dependencies between activities in the project plan. The resulting interdependence between members of the project team requires them to coordinate extensively during project execution. Project managers need a systematic methodology for describing and analyzing coordination requirements on project teams. This need is not met in traditional tools for project planning and scheduling. In this article, we describe an object-oriented framework for modeling projects and a methodology for formalizing these models such that they can be used for discrete event simulation of information processing and coordination in project execution. Our modeling framework represents projects in terms of objective (requirements), product (solution deliverables), process (activities), and organization (participants and relations). We then use matrix techniques to explicate the constraints betwe...

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