Critical Chain (CC) is a popular project management technique in many multi-project organizations. It applies the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to offer a practical and easy method for planning, scheduling and control of multi-project systems. While some prior studies examined CC performance for single-project management, little attention has been given to its performance in a multi-project environment. In this paper, we examine the control mechanisms of CC and some alternatives. We demonstrate that, when CC is not enough to prevent projects' lateness, such alternatives may give rise to similar and sometimes better, possibly much better performance.
We consider the problem of allocating resources to projects performed under given due dates and stochastic time-cost tradeoff settings. In particular, we show how to implement a state-of-the-art methodology known as "robust optimization" to solve the problem. In contrast to conventional approaches, the model we develop results in management policies rather than optimal values for the original decision variables. Hence, the project manager can postpone decisions to the point of time when they are actually required and then make them according to the optimal policy (which employs cumulative data on the project progress). The solutions are guaranteed to be robust-that is, ensuring feasibility except when the uncertain parameters assume extreme values. Still, as we demonstrate through an extensive numerical example, the price we need to pay to obtain that robustness is relatively small even for high uncertainty levels.
En el suroeste del estado de Chihuahua, México, en la reserva “Cerro El Mohinora” se desarrollaron series de tiempo dendrocronológicas de madera temprana, tardía y anillo total de Pseudotsuga menziesii con una longitud de tres siglos y medio (1657-2005), con el objetivo de analizar la variabilidad hidroclimática histórica de la región. La reconstrucción de precipitación invierno-primavera indica gran variabilidad interanual, decenal y multidecenal de los patrones de precipitación para la región. Sequías severas se reconstruyeron para los periodos 1695-1715, 1753-1760, 1785-1792, 1798-1806, 1819-1830, 1841-1870, 1890-1897, 1906-1912, 1924-1941, 1971-1977 y 1994-2005, aunque las sequías más prolongadas ocurrieron en los periodos 1695-1715, 1841-1870 y 1924-1941. Las últimas tres décadas del siglo XX y los años corrientes de la primera década del siglo XXI (1971-2005) indican un periodo de intensa sequía para la región, con impactos en lo ecológico y socioeconómico aun no cuantificados.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.