EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Sensitivity curves for effective project management

R. Alan Bowman

Naval Research Logistics (NRL), 2003, vol. 50, issue 5, 481-497

Abstract: A key problem in project management is to decide which activities are the most important to manage and how best to manage them. A considerable amount of literature has been devoted to assigning “importance” measures to activities to help with this important task. When activity times are modeled as random variables, these activity importance measures are more complex and difficult to use. A key problem with all existing measures is that they summarize the importance in a single number. The result is that it is difficult for managers to determine a range of times for an activity that might be acceptable or unacceptable. In this paper, we develop sensitivity curves that display the most useful measures of project performance (in terms of schedule) as a function of an activity's time. The structure of the networks allows us to efficiently estimate these curves for all desired activities, all desired time ranges, and all desired measures in a single set of simulation runs. The resulting curves provide insights that are not available when considering summarized measures alone. Chief among these insights is the ability to identify an acceptable range of times for an activity that will not lead to negative scheduling consequences. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 481–497, 2003

Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/nav.10064

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:navres:v:50:y:2003:i:5:p:481-497

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Naval Research Logistics (NRL) from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:wly:navres:v:50:y:2003:i:5:p:481-497