Project management software | EPFL Graph Search

Project management software (PMS) has the capacity to help plan, organize, and manage resource tools and develop resource estimates. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it can manage estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, decision-making, quality management, time management and documentation or administration systems. Numerous PC and browser-based project management software and contract management software products and services are available. The first historically relevant year for the development of project management software is 1896, marked by the introduction of the Harmonogram. Polish economist Karol Adamiecki attempted to display task development in a floating chart, and laid the foundation for project management software as it is today. 1912 was the year when Henry Gantt replaced the Harmonogram with the more advanced Gantt chart, a scheduling diagram that broke ship design tasks down for the purposes of Hoover Dam in early 1931. Today's Gantt charts are almost the same as their original counterparts and are a part of many project management systems. The term project management was not used prior to 1954 when US Air Force General Bernard Adolph Schriever introduced it for military purposes. In the years to follow, project management gained relevance in the business world, a trend which had a lot to do with the formation of the American Association of Engineers AACE (1956), and Rang and DuPont's Critical Path Method calculating project duration ever since 1957. The trend is also related to the appearance of the Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) in 1958. PERT went further with monitoring projects, and enabled users to monitor tasks, being at the same time able to evaluate their quality and estimate the time needed to accomplish each of them. As with Gantt charts and CPM, PERT was invented for military purposes, this time for the US Navy Polaris missile submarine program.

La modélisation des facteurs humains dans la gestion de projets

Roland Sauter

During the past years, project management has been rapidly spreading out into the various domains of human endeavor; project management is becoming the most promising form of management in a changing world. This development increased drastically the need for training programs for project managers, and the main challenge of those training programs is their behavioral aspect, the training of interpersonal skills. The aim of our work is to create a model of the human factors in project management, in order to build a training simulator which would integrate the technical expertise and the human factors. In order to establish a list of the relevant human factors in project management, we conducted a first survey among one hundred project managers. The findings of this first survey allowed us to work out a certain number of hypotheses, which were tested in a second survey on a larger sample of project managers (700). The construction of our model has been done with a precise goal: a training simulator – that's why we could simplify the problems in several ways, especially regarding the circular interactions of some variables in the model. The data gathered in the survey were used to determine the parameters of the model. The construction of such a model is the first specificity of our work. Then we developed a full-scale training simulator for project managers, and we implemented our model of the human factors in this simulator. The simulator is centered on the planing and execution phases of a project. A simple, easy-to-use interface allows the user to visualize the project status, to make adequate decisions and to see the effect of those decisions on the project and on the evolution of the human factors immediately. The integration of the technical tasks and the human factors into a simulator is the second specificity of our work. This simulator has been in use since the beginning of 1995, and 200 project managers have been trained since then. A survey was conducted among the trainees: it showed the high efficiency of this type of training in a virtual world, the very high motivation of the trainees and a high learning effect on the behavioral level.

EPFL1996

La modélisation des facteurs humains dans la gestion de projets

Roland Sauter

EPFL1996