AMERICAS CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION SYSTEMS - AMCIS 2013
August 15-17, 2013
Chicago, Illinois

TRACK - IT Project Management
MINI-TRACK - Resource Leveling: Problems and Solutions

Call for Papers

 

One factor that affects all project management endeavors is the constraint imposed by limited resources.  Extensive research in the past 10 to 15 years has been devoted to this problem and a plethora of software tools are available with features devoted to resource leveling, but scheduling projects under the condition of limited resources is still a huge problem.  Scholars have devise algorithms and heuristics to assist the problem of scheduling under the constraint of limited resources, but many of these studies apply only to simple projects that are restricted by a number of simplifying assumptions.  PERT/CPM techniques identify a critical path—a set of tasks that if any single task is delayed will delay the entire project.  But is the critical path worthy assumes that unlimited resources are available.  And so, is it worthy of the attention it has been given?  According to Herroelen and Leus (2005, p. 102), perhaps not:

 

 â€œThis ‘critical path’ notion indeed invites project managers to become trapped in the erroneous belief that the critical path determines the duration of the project, the misconception that the critical path activities are always the ones that require the most attention during planning and that effective project control implies that management should invariably concentrate their control efforts especially on the critical path activities during project execution.”

 

To address this problem, the critical chain was developed, based on the Theory of Constraints, which states that a system must have at least one constraint affecting its throughput.  Still falling short of expectations, especially where determination of slack is concerned, the critical sequence was developed to help identify those activities that were critical and calculate exactly which activities had slack and how much.

 

Research is needed in this area to find solutions that practitioners can use to better estimate and (hopefully) to shorten project duration, and to make changes along the way as needs and the availability of resources change during the life of a project.  This is even more important given that most IT shops are involved in several projects simultaneously.

We solicit papers that deal with these and other topics of project management as they relate to resource leveling, assignment and scheduling.  The focus of this mini-track is on the allocation and scheduling of resources to tasks within a multi-project IT shop.

Suggested Topics

• The effects of changing resource availability
• Resource conflict resolution
• Comparison of scheduling methods:
• Critical Path Method (CPM)
• Critical Chain
• Critical Sequence
• Scheduling algorithms and/or optimization routines
• Unpublished heuristics
• Using simulation to replicate the effects of scheduling and schedule changes
• Software tools & resource allocation/leveling
• Handling under- or over-allocated resources
• The effect of prioritizing on resource allocation
• Resource allocation in small & medium businesses
• Decisions regarding resource allocation when scheduling serial or parallel tasks
• Other topics as appropriate

Submisssions
Manuscripts to be submitted through the Bepress system at http://amcis2013.aisnet.org

Important Dates
• February 22, 2013: Paper Submission Deadline 11:59 PM CST
Mini-track Chair: