A challenge in project management in a multi-project environment concerns sharing human resources across projects. Generally, project-based organizations share resources to regulate and plan the project portfolio. This resource allocation process can be elevated through the estimation of required resources by assessing different strategies. Two strategies, static and dynamic, have been applied for resource allocation and compared project performance during this work. Our contribution focuses on how a resource-constrained and schedule-constrained project management policy can meet the planned project performance. Switching resources through dynamic allocation ensures that a project can be delivered on time even when there is no free resource capacity and hiring new staff. Besides, productivity changes as resources are switched among projects back and forth by exploring the gap between the actual and the expected completion dates that affect project performance. Three example projects portfolio has been analyzed employing a system dynamics simulation model. The aim is to plan and control the projects’ progress in a multi-project environment by analyzing human resources changes, which will help portfolio managers decide optimal resource allocation.
Multi-project management (MPM) effectively handles project-based organizations that use multi-skilled shared resources to execute projects, which is crucial for engineering teamwork and transdisciplinary research. Hence, allocating appropriate resources to projects is a significant challenge. Furthermore, projects are often executed in dynamic contexts with various sources of uncertainty, necessitating resource reallocation and rescheduling, which might influence other projects due to interdependencies. While mathematical approaches can help with low complexity problems or in a relatively static environment, they have limitations in characterizing interrelationships in multi-project settings and adapting to dynamic change. Considering these problems, we propose a model-based hybrid simulation system comprising system dynamics (SD) and agent-based simulation (ABS). SD can refine the complexity of uncertainty, while ABS provides decision-making support for dynamic changes. ABS models both projects and resources as agents, whereas SD reproduces the cause-and-effect relationship between project activities. Projects require resources to accomplish their scheduled work, while resources provide their skills and staffing. The outcome helps get insights into the impact of dynamic changes on allocation to the project execution process. The system is used as a decision-support tool for evaluating and obtaining feasible resource allocation solutions considering dependencies, uncertain occurrences, and resource constraints. Another intention is to motivate a transdisciplinary-enabling framework to support the systematic integration of knowledge with stakeholders.
The success of a project can be described based on the output performance of the project. Output Performance defines successful completion of a project with given constraints. To keep the project’s output performance high, it is very necessary to complete the project with defined a set of resources. One of the important resources of a project is scope. Scope defines the set of tasks need to be completed for a project. Scope change is a very common issue in software development project and this change has a major impact on productivity as well as the overall performance of the project. In this paper, we have proposed a simulation model based on rework cycle using System Dynamics for managing the project’s performance considering scope change. We have tried to compare the scenarios both for baseline project and project with scope change. In this case we have shown how moderate use of schedule pressure and overtime gives positive impact on productivity. And this increase of productivity also increases the performance in developing the project. The proposed model helps for decision making process that will increase the productivity and keep the project’s output performance high when the scope is changed.
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