As time-to-market reduction drives organizations to shorten their schedules, managers strive for optimal scheduling of people and other resources to keep project duration to a minimum. Recent developments in scheduling theory have provided managers with new techniques to find the best schedule for each project. These techniques take into account such factors as tasks of varying duration, precedence constraints, resource capabilities, resource loading, and business objectives.

This course presents several scheduling techniques that can be used for various projects including techniques for scheduling simultaneous projects in a matrix organization. Students are shown step-by-step examples of each technique and then work through several exercises in class. Participants learn how to select the best scheduling technique for a particular business objective and how to use schedule performance metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the optimization techniques.

Learning Outcomes

At the conclusion of the course, you should be able to

• Perform the calculations for that selected optimization technique
• Evaluate quantitatively the performance of that optimization technique
• Select the appropriate schedule optimization technique for a particular project business objective
• Apply generative artificial intelligence tools to enhance scheduling and optimization techniques in project management

Skills needed