Work

Project monitoring and control with an empirically grounded budget-release model

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Project monitoring and control (PMC) is a process of measuring a project’s progress and taking corrective action when necessary to ensure successful project completion. However, most existing models lack empirical validation of their assumptions and effectiveness, which limits their practical use. We fill in this gap by using empirical data from 97 real projects to calibrate activity-duration distributions and assess activity-duration dependencies, integrating these empirical foundations into an enhanced PMC model. We further improve the model by incorporating budget-release timing constraints and introducing two new policies for crashing and fast-tracking based on a project’s specific time and cost characteristics. Extensive computational experiments using empirical and artificial data evaluate the effectiveness of these policies. Because the budget-release policies and corrective action types depend on project characteristics such as activity-duration dependencies and topological network structure, key insights from this study can be usefully applied by project managers as heuristics even without a detailed model of their project.

Source: European Journal of Operational Research

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2025.06.007

Authors: Jie Song, Jinbo Song, Tyson Browning, Mario Vanhoucke

Institutions: Dalian University of Technology, Texas Christian University, Ghent University, Vlerick Business School, University College London

Language: English

Topic: Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling

Subfield: Management Science and Operations Research

Field: Decision Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,290

Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China