GREMEX—A Research and Development Management Simulation Exercise

Abstract

In planning and managing one of today's scientific development programs, the project manager must chart a course of action from seemingly innumerable alternatives. In addition to the quantity of decisions, his planning and management tasks are usually further complicated by a required compression of the time schedule for the project and by the knowledge that Performance, Cost and Time estimates, from which he must base his decisions, are biased and have an unknown amount of uncertainty built into them. Research and development management today attempts to give overall direction to its research resources applied to the programs, projects, and the systems making up each project, by requiring evidence of a concurrent, coordinated plan for achieving technical, cost and time objectives. Once such a plan is established and approved—a plan in which a high degree of interdependence and uncertainty exists—a requirement for a project team that is capable of literally “creating on schedule” has in effect been established. Management Technology, ISSN 0542-4917, was published as a separate journal from 1960 to 1964. In 1965 it was merged into Management Science.