Choosing the Best Scheduling Approach for Your Project - white paper

There are many approaches to scheduling projects: Critical Path, Critical Chain, Earned Value and Agile. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses and should be applied in specific situations. How can you recognize what approach will perform best? This 27-page article provides a new framework with which the best approach can be identified. The framework asks you to look at what the dominant project ideal and project constraint is in your project. Project ideals are: highest satisfaction, highest quality, shortest time, lowest cost and lowest risk. Constraints are: knowledge, time, cost, resource or risk. Once you know what the dominant ideal and constraint are in your project, the Project Ideal and Constraints matrix (PIC-matrix) allows you to identify what the recommended scheduling approach is for your project. It may even suggest a relatively new approach (Resource-Critical Path, Earned Work) to scheduling projects.