ABSTRACT
The research hypothesis was that many project performance issues, such as cost overruns and late schedules, are due to the fact that the currently available project planning tools employ an overly simplistic approach to estimating the cost and schedule for a project. Microsoft Project has no way to easily incorporate productivity differences or impacts, so the factor is simply disregarded. The users can work around the issue by playing with the unit’s percentage to capture productivity impacts on work completion, but this will have cascading impacts on other elements of the project, such as the cost of the project and any earned value calculations. In Microsoft Project, it is very difficult to set up a task where two different resources will work on the same task, but one will be assigned only after the first resource has left. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
