The successful completion of the project within the estimated duration is the main target to many schedulers. This will cause the contractor to gain more reputation, and the owner will start to reap the revenue from the project. Thus, effective scheduling of projects is a crucial aspect of management to avoid any delay and deliver the project within the estimated time, cost, and quality.
The difficulty of scheduling process results from three main reasons; uniqueness of the projects even though they have the same function, variability between projects regarding cost, time, and quality, and ambiguity which refers to unclear data, and inaccurate estimate.
Traditional scheduling methods have many drawbacks especially when the projects become very big and more complicated, which makes the control process very difficult. This problem put high pressure on researchers to develop more realistic and effective methods of scheduling projects.
So successful scheduling is a necessity to deliver the project without any delays. This causes many benefits to all participants:
Traditional scheduling methods can be classified into three main groups:
Experience-based Methods
These methods depend mainly on the long experience of the scheduler and can be applied to small projects such as the bar chart method.
Deterministic Methods
The precedence relationship between the different tasks required to complete the project should be determined along with the duration for each task then a network of the whole project is created where the long path is considered as the critical path.
Probabilistic Methods
It is very clear from the documents available in the literature that the most important factors affecting scheduling process for any project are the financial situation of the owners and contractors, resources availability, change orders, clear understanding of the project scope, communication between involved parties, prices escalation, and the delays in contractors’ payment as well as the managers, and engineer’s experience.
Nahid Shukurov , Project Manager
